Billion Dollar Sellers

Kevin King
  • 1.0 (1)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Biweekly

Twice a week the Billion Dollar Seller Newsletter keeps Amazon, TikTok Shop and Shopify sellers up to date on the latest news and tactics to sty on the cutting edge of e-commerce selling. The ia the summarized podcast version of the newsletter that comes out every Monday and Thursday.

  1. 2d ago

    How to Track TikTok "Halo" Sales on Amazon

    September 3rd, 2026 Summary: Kevin King explains why most of what TikTok Shop does for your brand never shows up as a TikTok Shop sale, and how to actually measure the halo effect on Amazon. He also covers Anthropic's launch of Claude for Commerce, fresh data showing AI shopping traffic converts far better than everything else, a new tool that checks whether your product is visible on Alexa, and the latest US trade numbers. Link to written version of the newsletter: [Insert link here] Key Points Discussed The TikTok halo is real, but Amazon won't show it to you. Paul from Rankster lays out the core idea: shoppers watch your TikTok videos, don't buy on TikTok Shop, then type your brand name into Amazon days later because that's where their card is already saved. Branded search climbs, organic rank climbs, and you get sales you never paid for. It's the only part of month two that pays you back later. Why the pixel can't help you. The TikTok pixel can't see Amazon, and Amazon won't let a third-party pixel near a listing. Amazon Attribution is supposed to fill the gap but doesn't when TikTok is involved. With no link and no click, there's nothing to attribute, so you have to measure the shadow instead. How to measure the shadow. Back in 2023 Paul ran ads for a grooming brand and Attribution reported nothing, so he opened Brand Analytics, went to Search Query Performance, and tracked the brand term week by week. It climbed right alongside the views. One gate applies: you need serious view volume first. A brand with 7.2 million views in 30 days has a halo to find, a brand with 12,000 views doesn't. Three tools that finally track it. Reacher correlates daily branded search against TikTok views with a lag setting, and it's the only one of the three that touches branded search. EUKA puts Amazon sales, TikTok views, and TikTok Shop sales on one timeline with your top Amazon search terms, and has MCP access so you can point Claude at it. Cruva links TikTok products to specific ASINs. New Marketing Misfits episode: Your Influencer Strategy is Dead. Kevin flies solo with Janvi Shah, the Harvard-educated co-founder of Hue, whose platform manages more than 4,000 vetted micro-influencers. She covers why you should stop scripting creators, why slightly critical four-star reviews perform better, and how answer engine optimization is changing the way ChatGPT and Perplexity find and recommend brands. The US trade picture has reshuffled. Vietnam now has the biggest trade surplus with the United States through the first six months of 2026, running just ahead of both China and Mexico. Back in 2024 the US deficit with China was nearly 290 billion dollars, way out front of everyone. In the first half of 2026 China dropped to the bottom of that group, below both Mexico and Vietnam. Anthropic released Claude for Commerce on September 2nd. Two AI helpers for online stores, with all the code on GitHub, free for anyone to take. Helper one is a shopping assistant that lives inside your store, searches the catalog, weighs trade-offs, and builds the cart right in the chat. Helper two is a store manager assistant that opens a morning briefing flagging stockouts, return-rate problems, and ad campaigns worth fixing. It drafts, you approve. The merchant assistant never changes anything on its own. It's a starter kit rather than an app you buy, so any store can clone it, plug in a catalog, and turn it on, paying Anthropic for the AI's thinking. It ships with eight working demos, and Wix had a working agent in fifteen minutes while Fetch Rewards had both running in under an hour. Safety rails and launch partners. The shopper agent is blocked from inventing prices or products, has hard limits on cart size and refunds, and hands off to a human past those. The merchant demo caught two buyer messages trying to trick it into refunding orders and cutting every price to a dollar, and flagged them as fraud. Launch partners include Shopify, Klaviyo, Square, Wix, Intuit, Priceline, Visa, Mastercard, and Accenture. Why Claude for Commerce matters for sellers. This isn't a one-off. Anthropic has been building the plumbing for months with a master product catalog, offer matching, and product crawling, the same building blocks Amazon and Google run on. A lot of paid tools just got a free competitor, including on-site search vendors, inventory alert apps, and marketplace platforms like Rithum, Sellercloud, Sellbrite, and Teikametrics. And the merchant side is built for smaller sellers, not enterprise. Software tool of the day: check if you're visible on Alexa. Amazon has quietly moved a big chunk of product discovery into Alexa Plus and Rufus, where shoppers ask questions instead of typing keywords, and Seller Central won't tell you whether you show up. Lumian's tool takes an ASIN, generates the questions a real shopper would ask, then actually runs them against Alexa for Shopping and reports where you rank and who ranks above you. The gap analysis is the useful part. Most AI visibility tools guess, but this one runs live queries and shows the actual rank, turning a black box into a checklist. It maps the difference between what shoppers ask and what your bullets, A+ content, and Q&A actually say. That's the same fix that helps you in Rufus, ChatGPT, and Google AI Mode, so the work compounds. AI shopping traffic is tiny but converts far better. Ethercycle pulled 24 months of analytics from 10 established Shopify stores, covering 274 million dollars in revenue and 2.2 million orders. Year to date in 2026, AI assistants drove just 0.1% of revenue, roughly 75,000 dollars out of 76.5 million. But those visitors converted at 2.66% against a 1.91% portfolio average, and 85% of that revenue came from first-time buyers. Adobe's data points the same direction. Across more than a trillion US retail visits, AI referrals in July 2026 were up 62% year over year and converted 60% better than non-AI traffic, with add-to-cart 28% higher, engagement 14% higher, and bounce rate 33% lower. It's vendor analysis rather than an incrementality test, but the direction matches Ethercycle's. What to do about AI traffic this week. Tag AI referrers in your analytics so the traffic shows up in reporting at all, because if you can't split AI-referred orders from direct today, that's the whole job. Then run a monthly pull with three numbers per cohort: conversion rate against everything else, contribution margin after shipping and returns, and repeat-purchase rate at 90 days. Then read your landing pages like a buyer who already did the research. Pull the ten pages your AI traffic hits most and check for accurate attributes, real stock status, current price, and shipping and returns in plain language. Compare that cohort's gross margin against paid search before you decide what it's worth. Links Mentioned: BDSS Market Masters 4 Recap Video Rankster Reacher EUKA Cruva Join the AI Amazon PPC Challenge (Chris Rawlings) Marketing Misfits: Your Influencer Strategy is Dead (Copy This) Subscribe to the Marketing Misfits Newsletter Lumian: Check if your product is visible on Alexa Hot Picks: Amazon sued over claims it ripped off advertisers Reviews are ruining your life How to launch Meta ads as an Amazon seller YouTube Shopping Creators can now tag products Stump Bezos Answer: YouTube is forecast to earn just $8.91 per user by 2028. Facebook is forecast to earn $83.29 per user, nearly ten times what YouTube pulls in. Parting Shot: "Formula for success: Rise early, work hard, strike oil." — J. Paul Getty Find us at BillionDollarSellers.com Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.   See the full Billion Dollar Sellers Media Library Ask the Ecom Oracle your ecom questions (better than Chat GPT!)

  2. 5d ago

    States taxing sellers on marketplace fees (hidden on Amazon payouts)

    Date: August 31st, 2026 Summary: Kevin King unpacks the Texas rule change that quietly made marketplace fees taxable for Texas-based sellers, what it costs, and the narrow window sellers have to push back on it. He also runs through the September e-commerce conference calendar, Amazon’s latest quarter, MCF with Prime taking the Prime badge off Amazon and onto your own site, and the market that has sprung up around buying tariff refund claims for cash today.   Key Points Discussed:   Texas rewrote Rule 3.330 so that marketplace storage of your listings, records and analytics counts as a taxable data processing service, effective October 1, 2025 The math: 80% of your fee is taxable at up to 8.25%, roughly 6.6% on every fee — about $9,900 a year on $1M in sales, about $49,500 at $5M Why critics call it a double tax: Texas collects on $115 of activity from a $100 sale with a $15 commission The charge follows the seller’s registered address rather than the buyer’s, so a Dallas seller pays it and a Denver competitor selling to the same Houston buyer does not Three reasons the rule stands on shaky ground: a 2012 position revoked quietly in 2020, an Internet Tax Freedom Act discrimination argument, and a new Fifteenth Court of Appeals signalling independence from Third Court precedent Connected Commerce Council polling of 400 likely Texas GOP primary voters — 71% opposed once told it raises consumer prices, 63% less likely to back a candidate who supports it What to do this week: pull three fee invoices, check the address your marketplaces hold, ask your CPA what else is in scope, and build 6.6% into 2027 pricing Amazon’s quarter — $200.6 billion in net sales up 20%, operating income up 43% to $27.5 billion, trailing free cash flow negative at $7.6 billion, and AWS up 37% The three September events Kevin is attending: Funnel Hacking Live 2026, UNBOUND, and AI Mafia MCF with Prime puts the Prime badge and delivery speed on your own site with no checkout change, which is what separates it from Buy with Prime The MCF math: $7.34 for a small standard unit non-peak, peak rates landing October 15, and roughly a 15% conversion lift needed to break even against a cheaper 3PL Sellers cashing out tariff refund claims early — Academy Sports, GoPro and The Children’s Place — and why pre-ruling sellers took 20 cents on the dollar while holdouts collect in full Third Person, the BDSN software tool of the day, matching brands to 3PLs through an AI screen of hundreds of providers   Links Mentioned:   Market Masters 4 replays (takeaways, workshops and SMART contest) BDSS Market Masters 4 Funnel Hacking Live 2026 — “Encore: The A.I. Era” UNBOUND, HubSpot’s rebranded INBOUND AI Mafia, the referral-only Tampa retreat Connected Commerce Council — contact Kristin Rae about the Austin meeting Third Person, the free 3PL matching platform Stack Influence (10% off by signing up this month) Blueland micro-influencer case study with Stack Influence   Hot Picks:   Brands are turning to TikTok Shop to grow on Amazon Levanta raises $22m series B investment as they keep expanding Walmart says Sparky AI users spend 40% more than the average shopper Amazon is expanding drone delivery 6-fold this year How to check if your customers came from Google or Meta USPS raising rates 6% from mid October to mid January   Stump Bezos Answer: 15% of your Facebook feed comes from your friends, family and followers.   Parting Shot: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford   Find us at BillionDollarSellers.com Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.   See the full Billion Dollar Sellers Media Library   Ask the Ecom Oracle your ecom questions (better than Chat GPT!)

  3. Aug 28

    Claude is watermarking your listing copy

    Date: August 28th, 2026 Summary: Kevin King explains how Anthropic's new statistical watermark works, why it marks AI involvement rather than authorship, and what Amazon sellers should actually do about it. He also covers a price-history deadline that lands this Saturday and decides your Black Friday discount, Amazon opening its Sub Same Day network to seller bidding, and a look at where Amazon really earns its global GMV.   Key Points Discussed:   Black Friday is November 27th, and the 90-day window Amazon uses to judge holiday deals opens Saturday, August 29th — September and October pricing sets the discount Liran Hirschkorn's cautionary tale: a catalog-wide price rise held for three weeks, then conversion fell from 11.6% to 8.6% with no ad changes and ad cost climbed from 22% to 28% of sales Three ways Amazon punishes a bad price increase: it shrinks the Black Friday discount via Typical Price, caps the deal price through 30- and 60-day lookbacks, and can pull the Featured Offer or deactivate the listing outright Deal thresholds: Best Deals need 15% off, Lightning Deals need 20%, plus an unpublished minimum Amazon layers on top The pricing playbook: units-weighted median over 90 days, test 2–3 products not the catalog, one step every 14 days, hold ad spend steady, judge on profit per unit Peak fulfillment adds roughly 32 cents per unit on top of the 3.5% fuel surcharge, so a September increase has to be larger to work in November Holiday deal submissions by September 5th for the lower fee; hard cutoff October 20th Marketing Misfits with Henrik Johansson of Gembah on why simple white-labeling is dying and custom product development builds defensible brands Amazon's global GMV concentration: the US alone is 51%, and the top five markets carry about four-fifths of the worldwide total Anthropic now watermarks text from every Claude model launched from a set date onward, with no opt-out, across the app, the API, Claude Code, and Cowork The trigger is Article 50 of the EU AI Act; Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI signed the same code of practice How the mark works: Google DeepMind's SynthID-Text replaces random word selection with a keyed pattern, so the path through hundreds of small word choices becomes the signature — nothing is added to the text Short factual copy carries almost no signal; long expressive copy like brand stories, A+ content, and email flows carries the most The mark records involvement, not authorship — asking Claude to proofread leaves the same signal as generating from scratch Nobody can check it today: Anthropic holds the key, the detection API hasn't shipped, and no marketplace has stated a policy Alexa recommends one product rather than ten results, and Alexa buyers convert 2.74x more often than browsers Amazon's Sub Same Day network is now pay-to-play for third-party sellers, with self-nominated ASINs won through per-unit bidding The bidding math: the fee applies to every unit shipped through the network but the upside only comes from the extra 12%, putting break-even near $1.07 on a $10 margin   Links Mentioned:   Join the AI Amazon PPC Challenge with Chris Rawlings Marketing Misfits: The Harsh Reality of Sourcing in 2026 with Henrik Johansson BDSN software tool of the day: score your listing the way Alexa reads it   Hot Picks:   Reddit citations used by sellers dropping rapidly on ChatGPT How Amazon's AI shopping assistant shapes marketing tactics FTC looking at enforcing new rules on personalized pricing tactics Walmart's fast delivery fuels 24% e-commerce growth   Stump Bezos Answer: Total US e-commerce sales for Q2 2026 were $340.2 billion, out of $1,986.5 billion in total US retail sales.   Parting Shot: "The measure of a life is not what you consume, but what you contribute. Spend less time owning, consuming, taking. Spend more time giving, creating, making." — James Clear   Find us at BillionDollarSellers.com Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.   See the full Billion Dollar Sellers Media Library   Ask the Ecom Oracle your ecom questions (better than Chat GPT!)

  4. Aug 24

    15 Years of Product Sourcing in 1 Email

    Date: August 24th, 2026 Summary: With Market Masters 4 just wrapping in Austin, Kevin hands the episode over to a sample edition of Marketing Misfits, the newsletter he writes weekly with Norm Farrar. The theme is product sourcing: Kian Golzari's fifteen years of factory-floor experience, what AI actually changes about supplier research, and where tariffs are pushing manufacturing next. Along the way there is a customer avatar framework, a welcome-sequence teardown, and the Cards Against Humanity case study.   Key Points Discussed:   Pay Chinese suppliers in RMB rather than USD — suppliers often give a quiet discount because it removes their own currency conversion cost Kian Golzari's background: he grew up around Chinese factories and learned MOQs, lead times and quality control before most sellers learn to sell The gold iPhones for Real Madrid players — proof that relationships, not databases, get impossible orders made The face-to-face factory visit is non-negotiable: better pricing, faster samples, extended credit terms, early access to new product concepts China +1 is a survival strategy — Vietnam, India and Mexico are the three most commonly used backup countries Legally separating product development costs from cost of goods can meaningfully reduce tariff liability Build relationships with backup factories before a crisis forces the outreach AI compresses the sourcing timeline: trend identification, market validation, Alibaba discovery and negotiation brief in hours rather than weeks Quality control and supplier trust stay human — AI accelerates discovery, not inspection Tariff picture: US tariffs on Chinese goods around 51% (up from roughly 20% pre-2025), India near 26%, Vietnam around 12%, Mexico effectively zero under USMCA Roughly 65% of US importers are moving away from China-only sourcing, and sellers who visit factories in person report about 23% lower defect rates The customer avatar framework: name them, write their morning, read 200+ reviews for their language, find the purchase trigger, define the transformation Welcome sequence structure across five emails spaced over 7–10 days, with mid-sequence segmentation when a subscriber clicks a product link Supplier red flags: no factory audit certificates, reused or generic factory photos, and a supplier who agrees to everything without ever pushing back Using AI to build supplier comparison matrices, due diligence checklists, negotiation briefs and landed-cost models Cards Against Humanity case study — deliberate polarisation as a moat, from $5 dirt to a $6 empty box Pappy Van Winkle: 7,000–8,000 cases a year against a $3,000–$5,000 secondary market price, and why the scarcity is real Sourcing FAQ: a four-day Guangzhou or Yiwu trip runs $1,500–$3,000 all in, and RMB payment pays off above roughly $10,000 per order   Links Mentioned:   Subscribe to the Marketing Misfits newsletter Stop Writing AI Marketing Slop (Do This Instead) with Mike Kaput 15 Years of Sourcing Secrets in 60 Minutes with Kian Golzari AI Just Changed Sourcing FOREVER with Kerim Kfuri Stack Influence (10% off this month) Blueland micro-influencer case study with Stack Influence Dragon Fish — email marketing and AEO help Collective Minds Society cigar and whiskey trip (Feb 18–22, 2027) Check out the Marketing Misfits podcast   Stump Bezos Answer: RMB, the Chinese yuan, rather than US dollars. Suppliers will often give a quiet discount for payment in their local currency because it eliminates their own currency conversion costs — a 3–7% saving that is worth the setup on orders above $10,000.   Parting Shot: "Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like." — Paul Graham, Y Combinator co-founder   Find us at BillionDollarSellers.com Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.   See the full Billion Dollar Sellers Media Library   Ask the Ecom Oracle your ecom questions (better than Chat GPT!)

  5. Aug 20

    Amazon is locking its data in the vault

    Date: August 20th, 2026 Summary: Kevin King explains why Amazon has started stripping product details out of its order emails and rationing review visibility, and what that data lockdown means for sellers who rely on scraping-based tools. He also covers how Alexa for Shopping has quietly rewritten the search bar, a study finding that half of all online stores can't be bought from by an AI agent, and a Marketing Misfits episode on moving an Amazon brand onto physical retail shelves.   Key Points Discussed:   Alexa for Shopping now sits behind the same search bar, turning one messy human request into multiple AI-generated searches across form, material, style, use case, and price Doug Herrington and Rajiv Mehta's roadmap — within five years, households reordering their own regular supplies will feel normal Two people typing identical words now get different results, because Alexa reshapes the candidate pool using remembered preferences before ranking starts Listing action items: linguistic coverage beyond your top 10 keywords, answerable product pages, killing contradictions between bullets and attributes, and filling every structured attribute field Reviews are now fact-checkers — Alexa cross-references claims against review sentiment, and overclaiming triggers an "this isn't an exact match" response with alternatives Retail media spend shifting to video: roughly 29% of Amazon sponsored ads and DSP spend in Q2 2026, up almost 5 points year over year, with non-video at around 71% and sliding Since July, Amazon's order confirmation emails no longer name what you bought — "Your Beauty item is confirmed" instead of the product — to starve Google's Gemini of inbox purchase data Reviews are being rationed, some listings showing as few as 8, with a 5 business day wait to request more; Amazon told Fast Company it is about stopping unauthorized data scraping The "DoorDash problem" — Walmart, Target, and Wayfair joined Google's AI shopping features while Amazon sued Perplexity, lost earlier this month, and built Alexa for Shopping instead Seller implications: unreliable review visibility, buyers walking when they can't research, and more memory work falling to branded inserts, packaging, and follow-ups Acom scanned 235 live product pages across 116 stores — median score 66 out of 100, but 47% of pages are missing every single thing an agent needs to complete a purchase DTC fixes: clear leftover noindex tags, allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot in robots.txt, put name, price and availability in raw HTML, publish shipping and returns as schema markup, and add GTIN/UPC barcodes Marketing Misfits with Korie Minkus on the 5-step Retail Operating System, and why 83% of US retail spending still happens in physical stores   Links Mentioned:   Andrew Bell's deep dive on the new Amazon search experience powered by Alexa for Shopping GetReviews — use code 1FREEONME for your first month free China Magic free supply chain audits — 25 slots only Acom's AI shopping readiness study Marketing Misfits: Take Your Amazon Brand to Retail (video)   Hot Picks:   The dawn of the shopping assistants era 51% complete their AI-researched purchases on Amazon TikTok is for middle-class creators, top creators prefer Instagram   Stump Bezos Answer: 94% of all creator influenced purchases happen on Amazon.   Parting Shot: "An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he'll quickly learn how to chew it." — Roy Ash   Find us at BillionDollarSellers.com Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.   See the full Billion Dollar Sellers Media Library   Ask the Ecom Oracle your ecom questions (better than Chat GPT!)

  6. Aug 17

    Amazon says search bar is about to change

    Date: August 17th, 2026   Summary: Kevin King covers Amazon's argument that the keyword search bar has hit the same ceiling the 1910 Sears catalog did, and its answer; conversational AI shipping to customers as Alexa for Shopping. He also digs into a study showing Google's AI Mode returns roughly 95% fewer products than standard Shopping, Helium 10's new Black Box Niche MCP, the five gates where every marketing email quietly dies, and why your packaging icons sell before your copy does.   Key Points Discussed:   Doug Herrington's 1910 Sears and Roebuck catalog analogy — every retail format has a ceiling, and Amazon's keyword search bar has now hit its own What Alexa for Shopping does today: answers instead of listing pages, recommendations weighted by what Amazon already knows about you, and image input (a fridge photo becomes a grocery list) Rajiv Mehta on opening the aperture on what shoppers can type, and what that does to the retrieval layer sitting underneath your listings Herrington's ambition of 10x the selection with no added friction — discovery decided by how well your product data answers a question, not by title-phrase matching Influencer spend has shifted down-tier: creators under 20,000 followers now capture nearly half of all US influencer spend, up from about a fifth in 2021 The nano tier (1,000–5,000 followers) went from around 3% of spend to nearly 20% in the same window Productrise study: standard Google search returned products on 88% of queries versus 23% in AI Mode, and averaged 22.5 products per page versus 4.3 Only 0.8% of the products visible in standard search also appeared in AI Mode for the same query that day — ranking in Shopping carousels does not carry over The counterargument: fewer slots may mean each one is worth more, AI traffic converts above average, and ChatGPT already pulls from Google's Shopping Graph Helium 10's Black Box Niche MCP — Xray-grade data on 10 to 20 keywords at once, demoed by Bradley across five niches in a single prompt The five gates every marketing email must pass (inbox, open, read, click, convert), the send-frequency table by segment, and four free copy-paste prompts Kitty Lai on packaging icons as a comprehension shortcut — keep them functional, match your brand personality, make them instantly recognisable   Links Mentioned:   Watch the replay: John Aspinall's AI product image system ($40,000 to an agency vs. 13 minutes in Codex) Build it with John across four live 2-hour Wednesday sessions (cohort starts this Wednesday) Meet your AI shopping assistant: Alexa for Shopping (Amazon's Learn and Be Curious, Episode 6) Productrise: Google AI Mode shows 95% fewer shopping products Helium 10's Black Box Niche MCP demo (Weekly Buzz #545) The Five Gates Where Every Email Dies — full write-up Stack Influence (10% off this month) Blueland micro-influencer case study with Stack Influence Package design expert Kitty Lai   Hot Picks:   Amazon's new user agreement is trying to curb lawsuits Walmart finally lets advertisers negative match search terms TikTok Shop on track to hit $100B globally this year Trump ditches small business reporting mandate Amazon's about to move you into a Seller Central you don't know   Stump Bezos Answer: The average half-life of a YouTube video is about 3 to 4 weeks — far longer than the roughly 5 days a short-form video gets, or the 48 hours a post gets on X.   Parting Shot: "Whatever can be measured grabs our attention. How much money we make. How much weight we can lift. How many bedrooms are in the house. And once we notice a number, it is natural to want to improve it. What is measurable becomes what is important. Not because it matters more, but because it is easier to see. Sometimes a new perspective is helpful. Rather than asking, 'How can I get more?' try asking, 'What is an inspiring way to live?'"   Find us at BillionDollarSellers.com Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.   See the full Billion Dollar Sellers Media Library   Ask the Ecom Oracle your ecom questions (better than Chat GPT!)

  7. Aug 13

    Naked Girl on Amazon Balcony (what?)

    Date: August 13th, 2026 Summary: On the newsletter's third birthday, Kevin King walks through John Aspinall's AI system that builds a full Amazon image stack in about 13 minutes, and a club panel on why AI hasn't replaced Amazon SEO but now sits on top of it. He also makes the case that Shopify is a payments company rather than a software company, covers an AI scam that stole close to a billion views from one brand, and calls out bad information circulating in the seller newsletter space.   Key Points Discussed:   John Aspinall's AI image system: product URL plus one photo produces a complete 6-image stack in about 13 minutes, with a strategy doc, competitor research, and a QA check that regenerates anything that fails Rolling a locked-in image standard across every flavour, colour, and scent with accurate packaging, plus Premium A+ built for desktop and mobile One product shot turned into 20+ social variations across Meta and Pinterest, and Grok Imagine for animated labels, pours, and spins for Sponsored Brands Video A9 still builds the candidate pool; Alexa for Shopping re-ranks it using personalisation, context, and shopper persona — classic optimisation is additive, not replaced Add bullet points 6 through 10: Alexa for Shopping reads up to the 10th bullet, but most sellers stop at 5, and 8–10 bullets are now showing for 3P sellers Rewrite for inference, not keywords: chain feature to benefit to who it's for to emotional payoff, because humans infer missing links and AI does not Run your main image through AWS Rekognition (free) to see approximately what Amazon sees Amazon's AVEN system reads the product in the image, not just OCR'd text — a crew-neck photo can drag down your relevance for "V-neck" Building a real avatar from Brand Analytics demographics, Market Basket Analysis, Product Opportunity Explorer, and Search Query Performance, fed to a top-tier LLM Pulling your own Amazon data report — Kevin's came back as a 742-page PDF going back to 1999; US only, blocked in Europe under GDPR The AI scam that cloned a brand across 277 deepfake channels, and Manny Suarez's 6-month legal war with YouTube TikTok Shop stats: sellers doubled, but roughly 54% of stores recorded zero sales in 2025, only about 2,100 cleared $1M GMV, and only around 135 cleared $10M Three years of the newsletter: 312 editions, twice a week, never a missed Monday or Thursday, 97,000+ subscribers Inboox: a searchable swipe file of 1.5M+ real emails from 10,000+ Shopify brands, filterable by journey stage and promotion type Shopify's Subscription Solutions did $802M last quarter against $2.9B in Merchant Solutions — 78% of the company Shopify Payments and currency conversion are roughly 82% of Merchant Solutions; GMV hit $116B in Q2, up 32%, with payments penetration climbing from ~60% to 68% Your real cost on Shopify is the take rate, not the plan fee — about 3.2 cents of revenue per dollar of GMV Guru B******t Meter: there is no A10 algorithm, and Rufus has been phased out in favour of Alexa Shopping   Links Mentioned:   Watch John Aspinall's full AI image-stack replay Build it live with John: four 2-hour Wednesday sessions on a real ASIN Try the Billion Dollar Seller Club for $9 and watch the full 90-minute SEO panel AWS Rekognition — see what Amazon sees in your images Request your own Amazon personalisation data report Titan AI — 14 days free access Marketing Misfits: the AI scam that stole 1 billion views, with Manny Suarez Inboox — 1.5 million competitor emails, searchable Scot Wingo's analysis behind the Shopify breakdown   Hot Picks:   Every day goods drive the future growth of e-commerce Titan Network buys Profasee Back to school is bigger than you think on Amazon Your next customer might be an algorithm Amazon limits access to customer reviews for some users Trump ditches small business reporting mandate   Stump Bezos Answer: $43.3 billion will be spent on back-to-school items in the USA this year — about $864 per family.   Parting Shot: "There is time enough for everything, in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once; but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time." — Philip Dormer Stanhope   Find us at BillionDollarSellers.com Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.   See the full Billion Dollar Sellers Media Library   Ask the Ecom Oracle your ecom questions (better than Chat GPT!)

  8. Aug 10

    Amazon now translates text inside your product images

    Date: Monday 10th of August 2026 Summary: Kevin King unpacks Amazon's new default behaviour of AI-translating the text inside your listing images across 16 stores, and why there is now a version of your infographics that nobody on your team wrote or approved. He also covers Reddit turning thread comments into product pages brands can't edit, a natural deodorant brand that never existed but still landed on the AI shelf in 21 days, and four things to look for when funding inventory.   Key Points Discussed:   Amazon began rendering listing images containing text in the shopper's preferred language as of August 4th, across 16 stores including the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, France, six other European countries, and the UK It's on by default, applies to every seller with non-media products, and asks nothing of you — the main image is exempt, but everything after it is in scope Translation happens inside a single store, not just across borders: Spanish for a US shopper, French for a Canadian shopper, in the US, Canada, Germany, Spain, and Belgium Amazon says translations run on AI with quality guardrails preserving brand elements, specs, and visual quality — but what the guardrail checks is undefined Two moves this week: read your translated versions in Image Manager, then decide whether to keep them — uploading your own correctly-translated images automatically removes Amazon's Extra scrutiny for supplements, food and beverage, beauty, and baby, where benefit claims get read twice Interesting stats: roughly 104 million Americans expected to shop with AI monthly by 2029 — more than 30% of the US population — climbing from around 80 million this year to nearly 110 million by 2030 Four things Amazon sellers should look for in inventory funding: paying for money you're not using, restarting the application every cycle, being able to move when a SKU takes off, and having too many disconnected tools Reddit is expanding a feature that converts product mentions in threads into standalone product pages with AI-written summaries built from redditor comments only — brands can't edit them Reddit began testing AI product deep dives in February in electronics, video games, and health and beauty; at Cannes it claimed half of US shoppers verify AI recommendations on Reddit before buying, and Semrush has Reddit appearing in roughly 40% of AI answers Morrowen, a fake natural deodorant brand built on an $11.25 domain and a three-page site with one AI-written essay, reached the AI shelf in 21 days ChatGPT with browsing named Morrowen first on a couple of longtail queries; Claude and Gemini never named it, and incumbent Native took the top slot 99 out of 180 times Morrowen appeared above a clinically tested product carrying a National Eczema Association seal — same list, same voice, same formatting The AI shelf moves at the longtail where no incumbent is crowned, and unlike Google it shows you nothing about your own position Stump Bezos: Shopify's merchant lending default rate   Links Mentioned:   Stop Renting Your Audience: The Email Playbook Top Brands Won't Share (webinar replay) DragonFish Book a call with DragonFish eCapital's Liquid Inventory Superfuel — AI agent that rewrites your title and item highlights The marketer's write-up of the Morrowen AI shelf test Stack Influence (10% off this month) Blueland micro-influencer case study with Stack Influence   Hot Picks:   Shopify: AI is driving more traffic and sales, not replacing Google Amazon sponsored product ads gain creator placements today eBay continues to bet on live shopping When should an Amazon brand consider expanding to Shopify TikTok Shop hits $118 billion in worldwide GMV   Stump Bezos Answer: 4%. Shopify lost about 4% of its lending revenue — roughly $141 million — to bad loans in Q2.   Parting Shot: "Clarity isn't about knowing what you want to do with your life, it's about knowing what you want to do this week. You don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to know your next step." — James Clear   Find us at BillionDollarSellers.com Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.   See the full Billion Dollar Sellers Media Library   Ask the Ecom Oracle your ecom questions (better than Chat GPT!)

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Twice a week the Billion Dollar Seller Newsletter keeps Amazon, TikTok Shop and Shopify sellers up to date on the latest news and tactics to sty on the cutting edge of e-commerce selling. The ia the summarized podcast version of the newsletter that comes out every Monday and Thursday.

Information

  • Creator
    Kevin King
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    214
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2024 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Billion Dollar Sellers

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