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Most Amazon sellers think they have a traffic problem

Which is adorable. Like watching someone pour gasoline onto a burning car because they're convinced it needs more horsepower.

Traffic isn't necessarily your problem. Your Amazon strategy might be a crime scene.  Your PPC campaigns chase shoppers who were already looking for you. Your listings convert about as well as a politician answering a yes-or-no question. And your backend keywords might as well be written in ancient Sumerian.

Meanwhile the Amazon advertising landscape has evolved into something resembling a casino designed by management consultants. DSP can reach shoppers before they search. Premium A+ content can help turn curious visitors into buyers. And AI-ready catalog optimization can make products easier for Amazon's systems to understand.

The potential is substantial. We're talking about campaigns reporting 18x returns on ad spend, thousands of new-to-brand customers, conversion improvements of up to 20%, and keyword indexing gains of 30–40%.

Of course ROAS isn't profit and impressive attribution figures don't automatically mean anyone's getting rich. Otherwise every Amazon seller would own a yacht instead of quietly developing a stress-induced eye twitch.

The point is that buying more traffic won't fix a business that's leaking money at every stage of the funnel.

Which brings us to something considerably more useful than another motivational webinar about scaling.

The 1:1 Amazon Growth Scorecard.

For a limited time AMZ Optimized founder Pasha Knish is offering a personalized Amazon Growth Scorecard, normally valued at $500+, at no cost. It examines which ASINs are holding back growth, where PPC is quietly cremating your budget, what Amazon's algorithm doesn't understand about your listings and which opportunities could improve conversion, indexing and profitability.

Think of it as a forensic investigation of your Amazon account minus the yellow police tape and the detective dramatically removing his sunglasses.

Get your free Amazon Growth Scorecard.

Because the goal isn't to spend more money convincing Amazon you're successful.

It's to actually make money.

Amazon Has Monetized Desperation. Again.

Amazon has finally answered a question nobody was asking: "What if begging for compliments was a paid advertising category?" Now Amazon wants sellers to PAY for the privilege of asking customers whether the thing they ALREADY BOUGHT was any good.

That is astonishing. It's like McDonald's charging the farmer to ask someone if they enjoyed their chicken nugget. Except McDonald's also owns the chicken, the farm, the ketchup packets and somehow charges the farmer a processing fee every time someone asks for extra ketchup.

Amazon's new Review Requests advertising format is expected to enter U.S. open beta in late October. Brands with fewer than 1,000 ratings and reviews on a product can pay to show previous buyers a little prompt while they're shopping: "Hello! Remember that garlic press you purchased? Would you like to rate it?"

No, Amazon. I'm buying toilet paper. Why is my garlic press following me around like a divorced detective?

To be clear, sellers aren't buying positive reviews. They're buying the chance to request them. Customers can still leave one star and write: "This blender sounds like a helicopter swallowing a trombone." Which means Amazon has somehow created a system where you can pay money to be publicly insulted.

That's not advertising. That's a humiliation fetish with quarterly earnings. Amazon already has a free review request button.

So the company has taken a free feature, dressed it in a tiny business suit, slapped an advertising budget on it and announced: "Introducing innovation!" Imagine your competitor starts paying for more review prompts. Their review count grows faster. You panic. You start paying. Everyone starts paying. And suddenly we're watching the world's saddest arms race: 40,000 Chinese spatula manufacturers desperately throwing money at Americans named Deborah, begging them to describe the emotional journey of stirring soup.

Amazon doesn't need to force you to buy review requests. It just needs to convince you that your competitors are buying them. That's how you turn fear into revenue.

So what should sellers actually do? For the love of all that is holy DON'T immediately throw money at this thing like a billionaire trying to make a submarine out of a Pringles can. Build a Review Spend Gate.

Yes, the name sounds like a scandal involving a senator and a suspiciously enthusiastic hotel concierge. But it's useful. Before paying record how many reviews your product normally gets per 100 orders. Keep using Amazon's free review requests. Then test the paid version on a few profitable products with decent ratings. Set a spending limit so strict it would make a Victorian orphanage accountant weep. Afterward estimate how many reviews those sales would normally have generated. Subtract that from the actual total. Divide your spending by the extra reviews.

That's your cost per incremental review. And if you're spending $80 to get one additional person to announce that your silicone whisk is "pretty good" STOP. Also watch your conversion rate. Because a review isn't profit. It's a stranger's opinion about a household object. And if your product is terrible paying to accelerate reviews is essentially hiring a town crier to announce that your trousers have fallen down.

The point is simple: make Amazon prove this feature deserves your money. Because reviews used to be something you earned by selling a decent product.

Now Amazon is exploring whether sellers will pay to speed up the applause. And if that works, what's next? Sponsored customer satisfaction? Prime Compliments? A $29.99 monthly subscription that lets Jeff Bezos whisper: "You're doing amazing sweetie" directly into your Seller Central dashboard?

Actually, don't give them ideas.

They'll launch it by Christmas.

Meta Ads, Creators & Budget for a New DTC Brand

Launching a DTC brand is simple. Find your audience. Run some ads. Make millions. Buy a yacht. Unfortunately nobody told Meta which decided to charge one new brand $800 to reach 1,000 people. At those prices it might have been cheaper to personally fly to each customer's house and explain the product over dinner.

And then there's the audience. The brand was built for moms. Naturally men started buying it. Because apparently the first rule of marketing is that your target customer hasn't read your marketing plan.

In this podcast three experienced marketers dissect the first six weeks of launching a DTC brand including the free account fix that helped rescue its Meta campaigns, the smaller budget that worked better and the increasingly urgent mission to bring customer acquisition costs down to $100.

Now they're betting on creators and credible doctors to make the economics work.

Find out how to launch a DTC brand without donating your entire budget to Zuckerberg

Headline Sold Separately

Amazon's October Prime Big Deal Days delivered the kind of numbers that make executives loosen their ties, pop champagne and briefly forget that money is supposed to be something you keep. Across roughly 2,000 brands average daily Amazon advertising spending jumped 148.7%. Purchases attributed to those ads rose 183.4%. Which sounds fantastic! Spend more, sell more, everybody wins! It's capitalism's favorite fairy tale, right after “the customer is always right” and “your landlord is raising rent because of market conditions, not because he's a human parking ticket”.

But there was one tiny detail. Median average order value fell 5.1%. Meaning customers were buying more while spending less per order. And sellers were paying considerably more to convince them to do it. It's like opening a lemonade stand, hiring Beyoncé to promote it, selling every glass at a discount and then celebrating because you've never seen so many thirsty people. Congratulations! You've disrupted the beverage industry. Your accountant is currently eating the receipts.

And this is the beautiful madness of Prime Day. Amazon has somehow convinced thousands of independent businesses that the best way to make money is to spend a small nation's defense budget convincing people to buy things they weren't planning to buy at prices the sellers would rather not charge. It's a shopping holiday that behaves less like a holiday and more like a hostage negotiation conducted by a Disney villain who just discovered dynamic pricing. And the truly impressive part is that the numbers aren't necessarily bad. Advertising-attributed purchases really did surge. Products moved. Warehouses emptied. Somewhere a man received an AI-powered avocado ripeness detector that will spend the next six years judging him from a kitchen drawer.

But purchases aren't profit. Revenue isn't profit. And Amazon's advertising dashboard is about as interested in your profit as a casino is in whether you can afford the Uber home. Because after the discount comes the advertising bill. Then Amazon's referral fees. Then fulfillment costs. Then returns. Then the inexplicable financial punishment of shipping a twelve-dollar object across a continent because someone wanted it by breakfast.

By the time everyone has taken their cut the seller may be left holding three dollars, a damaged cardboard box and the vague sensation of having been mugged by a spreadsheet. And yet the dashboard is green! Look at those beautiful green numbers! Green means good! Except apparently in e-commerce where green can mean you've successfully converted your operating margin into a promotional bonfire visible from space.

The genius of Amazon's system is that every seller is trapped in the same competitive panic. If your rival increases advertising, you increase advertising. If they discount 20%, you discount 25%. If they offer free shipping you briefly consider delivering the product personally and apologizing for being alive. Nobody wants to blink first because blinking means disappearing beneath seventeen sponsored listings for products that all appear to have been named by a malfunctioning Scrabble machine.

And Amazon? Amazon gets paid for the advertising. It gets paid when products sell. It gets paid to store the products. It gets paid to ship them. It's the landlord, the billboard company, the cashier and the guy charging admission to the building that's already on fire.

To be clear, that doesn't mean every seller lost money. Some may have made a fortune. Others may have acquired customers who'll return later at full price. Wonderful! But the headline numbers alone cannot tell us that. They tell us people spent more on ads and generated more purchases. They don't tell us how much money survived the journey.

Which is a fairly important distinction when you're running a business rather than a very elaborate charity for people who need discounted air fryers. And that is the uncomfortable question buried beneath all the October fireworks: "Did sellers actually make more money or did they just work significantly harder to make Amazon more money?"

Because if your advertising budget nearly triples, your prices fall, your orders explode and your profit quietly escapes through the bathroom window that's not necessarily a record-breaking sales event. That's a Black Friday-themed escape room where the only person who knows the exit code owns the building. And he's charging you per click.

The Revolution Has Prime Delivery

A few days ago another challenger stepped into one of the hardest fights in European retail. easyShop, carrying the familiar orange identity of the easy family of brands, says it is now live across 21 European countries. Operated by OnCommerce - the company behind OnBuy - the new marketplace is positioning itself explicitly as an alternative to Amazon. Hundreds of retailers are already trading, according to the company, and more are being recruited in time for the Christmas shopping season.

Witness Europe's attempt to overthrow Bezos with an orange logo and optimism

Shopify, Vercel Arm Stores for AI Agents

Sharing a stage at Vercel’s Ship 26 conference in San Francisco on October 15, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch discussed the future of agentic ecommerce, including the release of Shopify’s rebuilt Hydrogen software development kit and Vercel’s AI-enabled open-source storefront template called Vercel Shop.

Can TikTok Shop be about more than just shopping?

Executives at brands like e.l.f. Beauty and Jewelry Television say the platform can serve as an edutainment opportunity in addition to potentially driving sales.

Amazon announces plan to invest €16 billion in Germany in 2027

Amazon plans to invest more than €16 billion ($18 billion) in Germany in 2027. The new investments span jobs, technology, and infrastructure. These include the expansion of data centers and AI infrastructure, high-speed satellite internet through Amazon Leo, new logistics projects across the country, and a major new production slate by Prime Video.

Walmart, Sam’s Club combine Plus memberships into one fee

Walmart and Sam’s Club are combining memberships into one fee of $120 annually or $10 per month beginning Oct. 20. This is the first time the two business segments have offered a single membership, and the price is about $100 less if paying for separate memberships.