In Partnership with Rainsight

An eight-figure Amazon seller will spend 45 minutes in your account. Free.

Collins Paris runs an eight-figure Amazon business and built Rainsight. We’ve arranged for him to work through your products with you and find you opportunities.

Rainsight measures each product's last 2 weeks against its own 8-week baseline, so you see which are climbing and which need attention.

Use it 30 days free, no card. Then keep it at $97 a month, or don't.

Collins is doing 15 of these, through October 15. A bunch of you have already asked for yours.

Claim your 45 minutes.

You and 6,287 subscribers are going to enjoy this newsletter or i’ll forget my wallet when it’s time to pay for the cheque.

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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 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, 60 d

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SFTB Newsletter Recommendation! 🏖️ 

Mary Bartnikowski: Travel + Life + Self Help.

Hey Selling from the Beach! Discover how you can solo travel the world in my free newsletter. And read this post on how to Get Rid of Your Stuff to launch yourself into a life of adventure and fun. I'm an Award Winning Photographer, Author, Speaker, YouTuber, and CEO of Fun, Age 70, slow traveler for 21 years.

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.

To your success,

Rob & Max

In Partnership with Rainsight

Is one of your products slipping right now?

Max here...

Here's what a Rainsight signal looks in my account. This product averaged 15.5% conversion over 8 weeks, then dropped to 10.4% over the last 2. About a third fewer sales from every visitor, and easy to miss day to day. Not good, and something to look deeper at.

What might it find in yours?

Reply "review" to this email and I'll connect you with Collins, Rainsight's founder, for a free 45-minute review of your account. He’ll organize product groups, review signals, and identify what deserves attention.

Give it a try.

You and 6,287 subscribers are going to LOVE this newsletter or i’ll eat my famous chili and before our road trip together.

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Rockets and Feathers

Earlier this month Amazon sent me an email about holiday fees. Peak fulfillment fees start October 15, same as last year. Then one more line: the 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge they added in April "applies on top of holiday peak fulfillment fees."

My first thought was "Do these ever end?" My second thought was "probably not."

You might not remember Spring 2022. That spring, Amazon added a 5% fuel and inflation surcharge. Later that year our old friend Dharmesh explained it was for what they believed "may only be temporary cost increases." In January 2023 the surcharge went away as its own line. The cost moved into the regular FBA fee, and we’ve all been paying it ever since.

This new one has no end date either. Amazon's words: "when costs remain elevated, we implement temporary surcharges."

Economists have a name for this: Rockets and Feathers.

In 1990, Britain's competition regulator finished an inquiry into the gas companies. One complaint in it was that when costs went up, pump prices shot up like rockets. When costs came down, prices drifted down like feathers.

An economist named Robert Bacon, at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, went and measured it. He took seven years of UK gas prices and checked how fast they moved each way. The complaint was real, but small. Price cuts took about a week longer to show up than price rises. The gap was too small for him to call the market uncompetitive.

So the feather came down. Slower than the rocket went up, but it came down. In plain terms, if one station sat on a high price, drivers could go to the next one.

Amazon's fees went up like a rocket too. But my feather from 2022 didn't… come down. The surcharge line disappeared and the cost stayed in the base fee. Why? because there's no station across the street for me. My reviews, my rank, my whole catalog live on Amazon, and none of it comes with me if I leave. Amazon knows that. The sellers I talk to mostly figure the 3.5% is permanent already.

Every business raises prices eventually (I get it). Amazon is just a business whose customers can't pull into the next station.

In this story, you're the driver with nowhere else to fill up. Price like every surcharge is permanent. If one ever comes off, that's margin you didn't count on.

The IVS

Big thanks to Max (ME) for supplying this week’s IVS! Max is first and foremost an Amazon Seller, and he is actively testing, managing, and working in the Amazon space. Max has been helping Amazon sellers find their blind spots since 2020.

The 10 Biggest Things Amazon Announced at Accelerate 2026

No guest this week. Everyone is at Accelerate, so you're stuck with me (lower your expectations accordingly).

It's conference season. Amazon Accelerate just wrapped in Seattle, and Amazon streamed about four hours of main-stage sessions. We went through all of it so you don't have to. Every "Watch it" link below drops you on the exact moment Amazon announced it, so you don't have to scrub through a two-hour video.

1. An official way to plug your Amazon account into Claude. Amazon built a Selling Partner plugin for Anthropic's Claude and for its own AI assistant, Quick. Sign in once with Seller Central and your AI can see your sales, inventory, listings and shipments. No exports, no code. I already run most of my account through my AI, so this one hit home. Oh, and every seller can grab 12 months of Amazon Quick Plus free (you plus two users).
When: Limited US beta now. Free Quick Plus sign-up closes December 31.
Watch it | Amazon's post

2. Listing Protection. The one I'd care about most. If you're in Account Health Assurance (you consistently keep your account health rating above 250), most listing enforcements will come with a grace period to fix the problem BEFORE the listing comes down. Appeal in that window and in most cases the listing stays live until Amazon decides. You'll also get a warning before a price change goes live if it would get you deactivated.
When: US by the end of 2026, worldwide in 2027. No written page from Amazon yet.
Watch it

3. Walmart, Shopify, eBay and TikTok Shop inside Seller Central. Yes, really. Connect your accounts, see every order in one place, and ship any of them through MCF in a few clicks if you want. A profit-by-channel view and edit-once listings are on the way. Free.
When: US only, rolling out gradually over the next few months.
Watch it | Amazon's post

4. Prime on your own website, the simple version. Buy with Prime needed its own setup. Now US sellers using MCF can add Prime delivery as a normal checkout option for no extra cost beyond regular MCF fees. Early adopters saw more than 40% of eligible orders ship with Prime. You switch it on in the "Amazon MCF and Buy with Prime" Shopify app, and Amazon says setup takes under 10 minutes on average.
When: Live now, US only. Heads up: the old "Amazon MCF: US Fulfillment" app gets shut off this Wednesday, September 30.
Watch it | Amazon's post | Setup steps

5. Seller Assistant watches the boring stuff for you. Amazon calls them workflows. Pre-built ones watch account health, summarize orders, track pricing trends and find expansion ideas, or you write your own in plain English. It works in the background, hands you the fix, and nothing happens until you approve it. Every action goes in an audit trail.
When: Introduced September 23. Amazon didn't give a rollout date.
Watch it | Amazon's post

6. Auto optimization for Sponsored Products. Keyword auto optimization finds new keywords, pauses the ones not earning their spend, and keeps every bid under your max. In early results, Amazon says new campaigns using it got their first sale 40% faster. There are three at launch: keyword targeting, product targeting and seasonal moments like back to school.
When: Keyword auto optimization started September 23. No marketplace or written page given yet.
Watch it

7. Amazon builds your inbound shipments. Amazon pitched this at last year's Accelerate. Now it's actually going into beta. Seller Assistant lays out the whole plan (which SKUs, how many units, which locations, what it costs) and books it when you hit approve.
When: Beta this week, all US sellers "in the coming months."
Watch it | Amazon's post

8. Amazon Lending opens to everyone. No invitation needed. Check eligibility and apply in Seller Central. There are new lenders too, including lines of credit from Slope (backed by JPMorgan Chase) and SBA loans up to $5 million for qualifying US businesses, and you can now carry more than one loan at a time.
When: Open to every seller by the end of 2026.
Watch it

9. Test a product idea before you spend a dollar. In Opportunity Explorer you can now describe the product and price you're considering, and it compares your idea against what shoppers are searching, buying and saying about similar products. Tweak the features and run it again.
When: Live now, per Amazon on stage.
Watch it

10. Amazon's China warehouses go global. Global Warehousing and Distribution (GWD) is already open in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Ningbo, shipping into US FBA. Amazon says storage runs up to 45% cheaper than AWD in the US and FBA replenishment is up to five days faster. The same facilities will soon supply seven more countries, including Canada and the UK. One shipment, eight countries.
When: Live for the US now, seven more countries by the end of 2026.
Watch it | Amazon's post

Also worth knowing: Managed Placement at Origin (one drop-off in China instead of booking five US regions, no launch date yet), and a 90-day launch plan for new products in Seller Central by the end of October.

Anyway, pick the two that fit your business and go find them. Half of this is beta or "coming soon," so if it's not in your account yet, check again next month.

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Amazon News Week 40/52

Everything You Can Ask Amazon's Seller Assistant, Tested

At Accelerate, Amazon said Seller Assistant can now remember your business, run jobs in the background while you're logged out, and see your ad performance.

Is that true? Is it live? We found out:

We asked it. We asked it every question we could think of about ou

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Tastes Like Victory

Chase on the right.

One of Chase's buddies celebrated his birthday out fishing this year, and Chase got the invite. They hooked a mahi mahi, and it took the two of them together to reel it in. That's not an easy job. These fish fight hard, and they don't give up.

Down here nobody calls it mahi mahi. It's Dorado, the golden one, and if you've only ever seen it on a menu you've never really seen it. Fresh out of the water it's electric green and blue with gold down the sides, like it's lit from the inside. Then within minutes it fades to a dull grey-yellow. The colour comes from cells tied into the fish's nervous system, so once it's gone, the light show goes with it. It's also one of the fastest-growing fish in the ocean. Up to two inches a week in its first year, and most don't make it past five.

Right now is a good time to find one. The rainy season floods the rivers, the rivers push logs and junk out to sea, and dorado love to hang out under anything floating. Captains here will troll right past a drifting log on purpose, because there's a good chance something's under it.

Back in July I wrote about pulling the plug on the boys' devices for a week. This is the kind of thing I was hoping would come out the other side. Nobody planned a life lesson. Two kids tried something new, had to work as a team to pull it off, and came away with a story they'll be telling for years. I'll be honest, I needed the reminder more than they did. I run every business I have from a laptop, and it's easy to let a whole week go by where the most exciting thing I did was clear my inbox. Nobody remembers the afternoon they spent scrolling. Chase is going to remember that first large fish for the rest of his life.

After Marsha cooked it up, he took one bite and gave his review: it tastes like victory.

Canadian Company Selling on Amazon.com? You May Need Two IRS Forms

If your Canadian corporation sells on Amazon.com, the Canada-US tax treaty probably means you owe zero US federal income tax. Depending on your setup, you may still need to tell the IRS.

(although with all the changes in the world, who knows for how long)

The two forms:

• Form 1120-F as a "protective" return: check the Protective return box, fill in your company details and the page 2 questions, sign it, and leave income and deductions empty.
• Form 8833 behind it, saying you rely on the treaty (Articles V and VII). Article V says a place used only to store, display or deliver goods isn't a "permanent establishment". That's the argument for your FBA inventory.

Why file if you owe nothing:

• An undisclosed treaty position can cost a corporation $10,000. It's printed at the top of Form 8833.
• File nothing, and if the IRS later decides you owed, you can lose your deductions and credits (per the IRS instructions).

If you file:

• With no US office, it's due the 15th day of the 6th month after year end (June 15 for a December year end). You'll need a US EIN.
• E-file, or mail it to P.O. Box 409101, Ogden, UT 84409 by regular post. FedEx and UPS can't deliver to a P.O. box.

A few catches:

• Filing isn't a ruling that you owe nothing. Whether FBA fits Article V is your accountant's call.
• Line 6 of the 8833 asks for a reasonable estimate of your gross receipts, so you're telling the IRS your US sales.
• Up to 18 months late generally still counts, but maybe not if last year's was never filed. Don't count on it.

Not sure this applies to you? Ask Rob, he can point you to the right cross-border help. (Not legal or accounting advice.)

A Company Email Gets You Into a Free Corporate Hotel Club

Engine is a members-only booking site that resells negotiated corporate hotel rates. It's free in the plain sense. Its own pricing page says no membership fees, no contracts, no minimum spend. Hotels pay Engine a commission instead.

The gate is a business email address, one on your company's own domain rather than Gmail. It covers over a million properties in 185 countries, deepest in the US, and it sells flights and rental cars now too. About 85,000 of those properties carry Engine-only rates, so not every hotel on there is a deal.

Next time you book a hotel, open Engine in one tab and the hotel's own site in the other. Take the cheaper one.

What’s interesting about it? Hotels & Corporations pay to be on here. You pay nothing.

To your success,

Rob & Max

In Partnership with Rainsight.io

Hey beach lover! 🌴 

Something in your account is leaking money and you're too close to see it.

So I got Rainsight's founder, who has sold on Amazon for 15 years, to find it. Connect your account, read only, and Collins spends 45 minutes digging through your catalog with you. 

$97 a month after 30 days free, no card.

He's doing this for 15 people, through October 15.

Get your 45 minutes.

You and 6,287 subscribers are going to enjoy this newsletter or i’ll give my dad your number. He loves sending “funny” Instagram reels.

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Stand Behind It

My electric shaver died two weeks ago. 11 months old, $49.96 on Amazon. It still charges. It just hums and doesn't cut.

By 1:00 PM on a Monday I was talking to Philips. I didn’t even ask for a replacement I just told them what was happening. They asked for a receipt and a couple of photos. At 5:24 PM they had ordered me a new shaver and it arrived two days later.

A warranty is a contract. The contract I had for my shaver says 2 years. Philips could have made me prove my case. The receipt had my wife's name on it, not mine. They could have asked for the broken one back before sending a new one. They didn't do any of that. They just fixed it. It took them an afternoon.

In 1963 a law professor named Stewart Macaulay asked 68 business owners and lawyers a simple question: how much do you actually use the contracts you sign? The answer was: not much. When something went wrong they picked up the phone and worked it out. One purchasing agent told him: "You don't read legalistic contract clauses at each other if you ever want to do business again." Macaulay found the businessmen ran on two rules instead. Honor your commitments. And "produce a good product and stand behind it."

Now you. In this story, you are Philips. When a customer wants a refund on a product, give it to them. Even if it's past the return window. Don't read them the policy.

Produce a good product and stand behind it.

P.S. If you don’t believe in your product, what are we even doing here?

The IVS

Big thanks to SFTB friend Sylvia Vendraminetto for sharing this cool tip! Sylvia is an international speaker, brand ambassador and Amazon optimization expert specializing in buyer psychology and AI-driven ecommerce. She is also the founder of Ecomm Hero League - a group designed for brand owners looking to scale. Sign up here.

How Small Brands Can Outsmart the Giants

Competing with global giants and Amazon's own dominance used to mean having a huge budget… but 2025 changed that. Amazon's AI shopping assistant (Alexa for Shopping, formerly Rufus) has transformed how customers find and choose products, with shoppers who use it more than 60% more likely to complete a purchase during that session.

After a decade building ecommerce businesses, starting with a first six-figure Amazon FBA year run from a bedroom, and growing to over £2M in sales while helping 300+ brands, the biggest edge I've found for local brands isn't budget, it's speed. Big companies need quarters to test an idea and get sign-off; a local brand can decide on Monday, test by Wednesday, and adjust based on real customer data before a corporate team has even discussed it in a meeting.

The brands winning right now share three traits, and none need a big budget: 1) speed to test and pivot, 2) founder-led niche expertise no corporate manager can match, and 3) authentic relationships built through live shopping, micro-influencers, and real people showing up as the face of the brand.

There are also three fast, free moves any brand can make this quarter: 1) audit product pages by asking Alexa the questions your customers actually ask; 2) turn every unanswered customer question into listing content, since each one is a gap and a potential lost sale; and 3) diversify beyond Amazon. Building an omnichannel presence across Shopify, live shopping, social and more, so no single platform or algorithm can sink your sales overnight.

The real mistake local brands make is thinking they're competing with Amazon or big manufacturers. They're not. They're competing to become the product an AI shopping assistant trusts enough to recommend. That's a completely different thing entirely, and it doesn't require a Goliath-sized budget to win.

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Amazon News Week 38/52

The Guy Who Worked In Amazon Seller Performance Wants to Help You

One of you is getting an hour with Chris McCabe.

He charges $500 for it. He spent years inside Amazon's Seller Performance team, reading appeals and deciding who got their account back, so he knows what they actually want to hear.

Tell him what Amazon is doing to you: ASINs, marketplaces, dates, what they have said so far. Any issue goes (suspensions, hijackers, lost shipm

Unlock the full deep dive by sharing the newsletter with 1 person.

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(And you’ll benefit from using the resources we share)

Thanks from The Beach!
P.S. Your UNIQUE referral link is below. 👇️ 

Newsletter Recommendation

If you love to travel and believe creating memorable travel experiences is a smart use of your time and money, then the Travelling Lens insider is for you. It’s a free weekly newsletter that shows DIY travelers how to unlock premium travel using points, capture travel photos worth framing and plan every trip without the chaos. Subscribe here.

Making Easy Difficult

Celebrated Chase’s 12th Birthday. 9 years in CR.

One of the annoying things about living in Costa Rica is that almost anything involving the government takes a couple of tries. The rules change, or whichever agent you get that day decides something should be different.

Right now we are trying to get the boys their Costa Rican passports. We have a consultant helping us, and as she says, they love to change things.

We had a certificate for their Costa Rican social studies course, the one that says they completed the classes required for citizenship. We sent it in.

Oh, you need a stamp.

Yes, there is a stamp on the front.

Nope, you need one on the back. You pay for it at the bank.

Ok, it's about a dollar. Marsha pays it.

Oh, actually the price went up today. It's $1.20 now.

Ok, pay it again and make three copies of the receipt.

Oh, they only accept an official receipt from the bank. We paid online and have the online receipt.

Oh, I think the process has changed. Let me confirm who needs to sign a new one.

Sooo, you get the idea. Making easy difficult.

A lot of bankers and government workers here don't really care about common sense or getting things done. They care about checking a box or following a rule someone else handed them. So we are still working on the certificate. I can't imagine being our consultant, whose whole business is dealing with this day after day.

I Asked AI What A Seller’s #1 Fee Leak Is
(Check It Right Now)

You've heard this one before. Check it anyway.

I asked my AI one question this week: what's the number one way sellers lose money to Amazon fees, the thing anyone can check? It came back with the answer you’ve heard before. Amazon has your product recorded bigger or heavier than it is, so you pay one size tier too high on every single unit.

It's silent because it hides inside your normal FBA fee. And Amazon only pays back the last 90 days.

I ran the check on my own catalog. Three versions of the same product, same box, same contents. One is billed as Small Standard. Two are billed as Large Standard. $1.17 a unit apart.

Here's the check. Type "Fee Preview" into the Seller Central search bar and download the report. Five columns matter: longest-side, median-side, shortest-side, item-package-weight, product-size-tier. Put your packed unit on a kitchen scale (yes, a kitchen scale), grab a tape measure, and compare.

Small Standard ends at 0.75 inches on the shortest side and 16 oz. If Amazon has you over either line and you're not, that's the Small-to-Large Standard jump, $0.31 to $1.51 a unit. Over 18 inches on the longest side or 20 lb is bulky, $1.96 to $4.31 a unit.

The shortcut: sort by size tier and look for the same product sitting in two tiers. That's the smoking gun.

Found one? Type "remeasure" into the same search bar, file it, then ask for the last 90 days of fees back.

Do it before the next scan changes something else.
(better yet, get AI to do it)

Land Sunday, Work Monday, Skip the Jet Lag

Timeshifter is a jet lag app. You give it your flights and your normal sleep times, and it hands you an hour-by-hour plan for the trip: when to get bright light, when to avoid it, when to take melatonin and caffeine, when to nap. The plan starts before you leave and runs until you're adjusted.

The science behind the app is decades of sleep-lab research on the body clock, mostly about when you see light and when you don't. Timeshifter's chief scientist, Steven Lockley, spent over 20 years on the Harvard Medical School faculty, and the company says the app runs the same algorithms NASA used for astronauts and mission controllers.

Their own numbers: across about 130,000 post-flight surveys, travelers who followed the plan were 14 times less likely to report very severe jet lag. Self-reported, so treat it as directional.

The play. Download it, build your plan before the next long-haul, and follow every cue even when it feels wrong (yes, even the nap).

To your success,

Rob & Max

In Partnership with Rainsight

Hey beach-goer! 🌴 I spoke with Collins Paris of Rainsight.io this week. He's built an awesome tool that shows every product's long-term flow, and which are trending up and which are slowly bleeding.

Collins runs a 9-figure non-dairy creamer brand on Amazon… and he is offering Rainsight @ $97/mo. Beach readers get 30 days free. All there is to do is sign up and sync your account, no credit card required, and he will spend 45 minutes with you inside your own Rainsight account: showing you around, digging through your catalog, and finding you opportunities. It works best if you have 10+ ASINs, private label, or are a reseller. He's limiting himself to 15 spots, through October 15.

Take one of the 15.

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Two Kinds of Decisions

I’ve been on a Daniel Kahneman kick lately. You may know him from the bestseller Thinking, Fast & Slow. I came across an article about overconfidence and gut decisions, and it got me thinking about how decision making works for Amazon sellers.

Now… some of my Amazon decisions get graded fast. Some of them never really get graded at all. And of course by grading I mean, did they work… or not?

1. The fast ones (Graded in days or a week):

• A bid change

• A price

• A main image

• A title

If I change a bid on Tuesday, by Friday I know if it worked. The answer comes back in days and it's clear. Yes or no. I've made that call thousands of times. Every one of them taught me something, which is why my instinct there is real.

2. The slow ones. Graded in months, if ever.

• Which product to launch

• How big a PO to place

• Which supplier to bet on

• When to kill a product

I choose it, I order it, it ships, it launches, and six months later I find out how it went. Even then I can't say exactly why. Was it the product? The timing? A competitor who landed the same week? Reviews that came in slow?

(And I can list every product I've ever launched from memory…which is the whole problem)

Nobody gets good at anything this way. If I took 30 blindfolded jump shots over 10 years and got the score mailed to me the following spring, I wouldn't call myself a shooter.

It doesn't feel like that from the inside, though. Ten years of picking products feels exactly like 10 years of getting better at picking products. My confidence arrived because time passed. But does that mean I know what I’m doing?

My PPC already proves it. It runs on rule-based automations somebody smarter than me built, and they beat my own management. My product picks still run on my gut, and I don't know if my gut is any good, because nothing has ever 100% confirmed it.

So on the slow calls I'm using rules instead. Not a clever rules. Boring ones, written down:

• How much cover before I reorder

• What margin a product clears before I launch it

• What a supplier has to do before I replace them

A written rule doesn't win because it's smart. It wins because it's consistent, and I'm not consistent (you’re not, either). My gut moves with my mood, my cash position, and whatever happened last week. Two psychologists once reviewed 136 studies pitting expert judgment against simple written rules, and the rules matched or beat the experts almost every time.

My experience isn't worthless. It's worth a lot in one place and not as much in another. I'll trust my gut on the calls Amazon grades in a week, but I’m writing a rule for the ones it grades in a year.

The IVS

Big thanks to our good friend Ritu Java for coming on again to the newsletter and posting an awesome tip. Ritu is endlessly friendly and helpful and writes a wonderful AI newsletter. If you’re looking for PPC help, check out her company, PPC Ninja.

A Claude Code Hack for Leaving Your Desk

Claude Code is great when you’re sitting at your computer.

But some of the best use cases are the ones where you don’t want to sit there watching it work. Maybe Claude is halfway through a build. Maybe it is cleaning up a system, working through files, or handling something that is going to take a while. You want it to keep going, but you also want to leave your desk.

There is a simple way to do that. If Claude is already running in your terminal, type:

/remote-control

Then open the Claude app on your phone and tap Code. Your existing Claude Code session shows up there.

The important part is that the work is still happening on your laptop, using the same files, tools, and setup you already have there. Your phone is just the remote.

I used this while building a system to track all the AI workflows my team has created, because they were scattered across a dozen different places.

I had to leave halfway through. So I turned on remote control and walked out. Claude kept working on my laptop. When it reached a decision it needed me to make, I got the prompt on my phone. I answered it there and kept going. By the time I got home, a big chunk of the build was done.

This is where I think the feature gets interesting. There is a lot of attention right now on fully autonomous agents. OpenClaw, Hermes, and more. Those systems are interesting, but they are also a bigger commitment. More setup. More moving parts. More to understand before you are comfortable letting them run.

Remote control gives you a useful step in between. You are not handing everything over to an autonomous agent. You are letting Claude keep working on your machine while you move on with your day. And when it needs you, you can still step in. You keep your hand on the wheel. You just don’t have to stay in the chair.

So the next time Claude Code is running and you need to leave, type /remote-control. Open Claude on your phone. Tap Code. And keep going.

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Amazon News Week 33/52

What would your product idea actually cost to make?

We will get you a real factory quote for a product you have been thinking about.

Limited to 3 Selling From the Beach Deep Dive readers only.

Not a guess at what it should cost. The real number. Factory price, minimum order, tooling if there is any, and how long it takes to make.

What you send us:

• A link to a similar product on Amazon or Alibaba
• What is different about yours
• Size, material, colo

Unlock the full deep dive by sharing the newsletter with 1 person.

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Above 👆️ is the “Deep Dive” resource. There’s one in every newsletter. This is unlocked forever if you refer 1 person. It’s easy. Seriously. Just tell 1 person 🙂 Your friends will thank you for putting them onto such a good place for Amazon content & news.

(And you’ll benefit from using the resources we share)

Thanks from The Beach!
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Real Estate Here is Slowing Down for Sure!

After the massive post-covid boom, when building and buying were on fire and prices jumped like crazy, things have come to a screeching stop. There are still sales happening, but there's a lot sitting on the market now.

The ultra rich are still buying. But in our area alone there are about 10 houses listed between $2.8 and $3.5 million. At that price, your buyer has to be someone who wants to live here full time. I don't think the math works as a short-term rental or a long-term hold at that number. (the first home my buddy owns and just rented to a pro poker player and his family that are here for a year).

Around me, about 6 of those are still under construction, hoping to sell before they're finished. You can tell which ones. Some sites are down to a handful of guys puttering away, stretching out the work to slow the cash burn. The play is obvious: get it sold before you have to pay for the windows and the AC units.

Busy season is a few months away, and maybe things pick up. But I think some prices have to come down before there's real action. The question is how far they have to drop before buyers feel good about their portfolios back home and start writing offers again.

The numbers back it up. Active listings in Tamarindo were up about 50% year over year as of last August, and nearly the same in Hacienda Pinilla. The Tico Times reported that median values in Guanacaste came down from peaks above $900K in 2024 to the mid $500s by early 2025. Some of that is just cheaper properties making up more of the sales, but the direction is clear.

Set Up Claude Code On The SP-API. That's The Whole Hack.

I could come in here this week and give you a good Amazon hack (they have been good lately). BUT I'm feeling fired up though, so I'm going to give you the BIG KAHUNA.

The biggest Amazon hack you can do right now is set up Claude Code or Codex so it can read the Amazon SP-API. That's Amazon's official Selling Partner API. It hands your AI your orders, your inventory, your fees, your listings.

You will not find a bigger one in anyone's newsletter in the last year. This is the thing that opens up your Amazon account.

How do you do it? Ask Claude how. Or ask whatever AI you already use, it'll walk you through the whole setup.

Now.. we ran a poll in SFTB and 83% of people said they didn’t do it because they didn’t know how.

Don't be afraid of it. And if you can't get it working, hit reply and we'll have a chat about getting it set up for you.

The Exact Month Cheap Train Tickets Go On Sale in Each Country

Train tickets do not work like plane tickets. Every railway opens sales on its own schedule, and the cheap advance fares only exist inside that window. Eurostar and German domestic trains open 11 to 12 months ahead, French TGVs and Trenitalia 4 months, Bulgarian domestic trains 5 days. Miss it and you pay walk-up costs like 140 euros for Paris to Nice against 25 booked ahead.

Seat61.com is where those windows are written down, free, by one man. Mark Smith ran Charing Cross, London Bridge and Cannon Street for British Rail, then ran the team regulating fares and ticketing at the Department for Transport, and quit in 2007 to do this full time. Route by route he names the site to buy on and its booking fee. Simply amazing.

Yes the site looks like it was designed in GeoCities in 2004. But it works.

I recommend some serious nerding out here if you are into train travel!

To your success,

Rob & Max

Got a Tax question? Cross-border? GST? Bookkeeping?

Email me today: jonescosmanca@gmail.com. Yes, I will answer.

Jones & Cosman is our accounting firm. We handle everything taxes, GST, money, bookkeeping, etc., & we sell on Amazon too, so you can skip the part where you explain what FBA is.

You and 6,287 subscribers are going to enjoy this newsletter or i’ll take you out to a movie and whisper questions to you the entire time

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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.

Watch the video.

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Amazon News Week 36/52

Heading to Amazon Accelerate? (you should go!) Here’s a complete list of all the parties taking place.

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, forgotte

Unlock the full deep dive by sharing the newsletter with 1 person.

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(And you’ll benefit from using the resources we share)

Thanks from The Beach!
P.S. Your UNIQUE referral link is below. 👇️ 

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

To your success,

Rob & Max

In Partnership with Jones Cosman

Someone Definitely Wants To Own Your Amazon Business

What happens the day you stop showing up for your business? If the honest answer is that it slowly falls apart, you have built yourself a job, not an asset someone else can take over and pay for. The fix is boring and it works: get what's in your head onto paper, build a small SOP library, make yourself removable. It is the highest-leverage thing you can do before you ever think about selling, and most owners wait until it's too late to matter.

Rob and Marsha help ecommerce owners turn the thing they run into a thing someone else can buy.

Try the free exit readiness scorecard, here

You and 6,287 subscribers are going to enjoy this newsletter or all your FBA Inventory will be stuck at “checked in” for a month.

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600+ Corrections

There is a file on my computer with 600 corrections in it. Every one is something I told my AI after it handed me work I didn't like.

The system could not be simpler: before the AI does anything, it has to read that file. That's it. Every no I have ever said, in plain English, sitting in front of it every time it starts. I took a look at it, and I sound like a very tired manager.

A correction that lives in the chat dies with the chat. Tomorrow's session starts from zero and makes yesterday's mistake with full confidence. I spent months in that loop, fixing the same things over and over and calling the tool dumb. The tool wasn't dumb. It just couldn't remember, and I was letting every lesson disappear.

Writing it down changes what a correction is worth. It ends that avenue of errors in theory. In practice, it sometimes makes the same mistakes, but much more rarely.

And it solves a problem I didn't know I had: I could never have written my standards out up front. Nobody can. I don't know what I want until I see what's wrong. But a miss? A miss I can spot instantly. So the file wrote itself, one no at a time, and 600 “No’s” later it describes what I want better than anything I could have produced from a blank page.

Reject enough, in writing, and you eventually land exactly where you wanted to be: first drafts that have already cleared 600 objections before you ever see them.

The IVS

Thanks to John Aspinall for supplying this week’s IVS. If you’re in the Amazon space you’ve probably heard of John. He’s always talking about CTR, AI, & the latest ecom developments. You can find him at ASPI, ProductPinion, & Velocity Sellers. Check out his A 4-week live AI bootcamp for operators. Starts Monday. Use AUGUST250 for $250 off.

Jack Dorsey just built a Slack killer with AI inside

Hey SFTB! Check out this video where I walk through Buzz, Jack Dorsey's new Slack-style workspace with AI agents built right into it. I set up a whole Marvel-themed team of agents, each with its own job and its own model, and you can watch them delegate tasks, message each other, and work in parallel like real teammates. You should pay special attention to the subscription part: Buzz runs on the AI plans you already pay for (Claude Code, Codex, Grok) instead of burning through API credits.

If you've ever duct-taped an AI bot into Slack and walked away underwhelmed, this one is worth ten minutes of your day. Enjoy!

Amazon News from Week 32/52

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What happens to your Amazon business if you're in a hospital bed next week?

 Who pauses the ads? Who answers the email from Amazon with a deadline in it? Who knows which bank the payouts land in?

Count the people who can log into your Seller Central, answer the two-factor text on your phone, and pay the card behind your ad account. If the answer is one, this deep dive is for you.

The machine does not wind down gently. FBA keeps shipping, which buys your family time, but ads keep spending with nobody watching, there’s buyer messages, seller support cases, etc…

So we built the

Unlock the full deep dive by sharing the newsletter with 1 person.

(If you’re feeling lazy, scroll to the top, there’s a pre-populated email for you!)

Above 👆️ is the “Deep Dive” resource. There’s one in every newsletter. This is unlocked forever if you refer 1 person. It’s easy. Seriously. Just tell 1 person 🙂 Your friends will thank you for putting them onto such a good place for Amazon content & news.

(And you’ll benefit from using the resources we share)

Thanks from The Beach!
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Camp and Culture Shock

We are still on the road this week and picking the kids up after a week at sleepover camp. This was their second year going, and you can really see both boys growing and maturing.

I think camp is so good for kids. It helps them break out of their shell a bit, become more independent, and in our case, spend some much-needed time away from each other.

While they were at camp, Marsha and I spent the week in a little ski hill community. After seven days back in Canada, we are definitely experiencing some culture shock. Why is eating out so expensive now? Restaurants are adding 2% credit card fees, 1% “village improvement fees,” and suggested tips starting at 18%, sometimes just because someone passed you an iPad to pay. Not to mention “surge pricing” for the attractions. I will say our Amex Platinum finally came through for us. We got a room upgrade and two free Starbucks drinks every day.

The Westin we stayed at was interesting because the rooms are privately owned. Owners get six days a month for personal use, plus 45 flex days during the year. I saw a two-bedroom unit listed for $429,000 that apparently nets around $9,800 a year. Not exactly a great return, but it could help pay for a family ski season if you were going to use it anyway.

The servers we talked to all said it was much slower this season. It feels like the middle class is getting squeezed. People are still travelling, but they are definitely spending less once they get there.

We are in Toronto for a few days now. The traffic sucks, everyone is in a rush, and it is busy everywhere. I do not miss that. It was nice being able to go to the mall and pick up a last-minute sport jacket for a wedding, even though I will probably never wear it again.

More than anything, it made me appreciate how much stuff we no longer need living in Costa Rica (sport jackets, winter clothes, and $10 Starbucks).

Amazon told me "no room"

This week Amazon refused a routine shipment into Amazon.ca. The account was at 94% of its storage limit, no room for the rest of the order. But I was able to buy my way out of the issue:

(This has been out a while, but you may have forgotten. Q4 is soon!)

What it is: Capacity Manager. Amazon's auction for extra FBA warehouse space. Every account has a monthly storage limit. When the limit is smaller than your plans, you don't file a ticket and beg. You bid.

How it works: You request extra space for a future month and name the maximum
reservation fee you'd pay per cubic foot. Amazon runs allocation roughly twice a week and grants the highest bids first until the spare space runs out.

The capacity monitor

Say you request 200 cubic feet (about three pallets) at a $3 fee per cubic foot. Worst
case you owe $600. But every $1 of sales you make with that extra space earns a $0.15
credit against the fee. Sell $4,000 of the inventory and the $600 is wiped out. Three
pallets is almost always worth more than $4,000 at retail, so if it sells at all, the
space costs you nothing.

How to de-risk it:

• Run that same math before you bid: your total fee divided by 0.15 is roughly the sales
the extra space has to produce. Bid a number your slowest month still covers.

• Only request space you will actually fill. The fee applies to granted capacity whether
you use it or not.

• Set a short expiration date on the request. If Amazon hasn't granted it within a few
days, it dies clean instead of surprising you later.

How long it takes: Grants typically land within 48 to 72 hours: you get an email, the
request flips to "Granted", and the space is live for the month you requested.

Here’s Where You Should Sit

SeatGuru was a website we recommended back on SFTB Newsletter #1 (Oct 30, 2023).

But… TripAdvisor shut SeatGuru down in November 2025 and 25 years of seat data went dark (seatguru.com now just says "SeatGuru has closed down").

So, let’s introduce you to aerolopa.com! Here’s where the seat nerds hang out: seat maps hand-drawn to scale by an architect, one drawing per airline per aircraft variant, with per-seat ratings, covering 200+ airlines. British Airways alone has 28 distinct cabin configurations mapped, including four different 777-200ER layouts, which matters because the great seat on one variant is a windowless wall seat on another.

SeatGuru's original creator joined the aeroLOPA team after the shutdown, which makes it the de facto successor. Free after creating a quick account. Check it before you pay for seat selection, not after.

To your success,

Rob & Max

Stop letting busywork get in the way of selling

Researching accounts. Building lists. Writing sequences.

There's a better use of your team's time.

Apollo is the AI revenue engine that handles the busywork, so you can stay focused on selling.

Plus, everything you need is in one place:

• 230M+ verified contacts

• AI-powered outreach

• Data enrichment

• Inbound lead capture

• Meeting scheduler

• And more

Stop doing busywork and start building pipeline, faster.

With Apollo — the AI revenue engine powering 4M+ users.

Sign up for free

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Nobody Cares Like You Do

A friend I’ll call Carmen was complaining to me about her employees to me last week. "My team just doesn't care the way I do,” she said. I can relate. I don’t think I’ve ever found an employee that wants it as bad as me.

As business owners, we’ve tried everything. Sharper interview questions. Core values. Bonuses. And still, people phone it in. Why?

That conversation sent me down a research rabbit hole: what creates real buy-in from real employees? (I'm aware I once wrote to you about automating my own team's work. The irony isn't lost on me.)

Owners don't care because of the money. This study tracked thousands of self-employed Americans and found that after ten years, the median founder earns about 35% LESS than they would have made as an employee. They’d be richer with a job. And yet they stayed anyway.

It turns out they stay and care theirs. Their name, their decisions, their upside, their fault.

This means we can't hire caring, and we can't pep-talk it into anyone. What made you care is the same thing that makes them care: ownership. Real pieces of it, handed over on purpose.

When the Ritz-Carlton gave every employee, housekeepers included, authority to spend up to $2,000 fixing a guest's problem without asking a manager, franchise owners threatened to sue. Nobody has ever needed the full amount. A plate of cookies usually does it. The rule exists to tell employees: we trust you.

Jack Stack saved a dying engine factory by teaching every worker to read the P&L and handing them a stake. The company that grew out of it does $600 million a year now.

So that's the answer I landed on: A number that’s theirs and a domain they run without asking. A visible slice of whatever the company makes. Sized to whatever you can afford, but real.

They don't need to care about the whole thing. Just their piece.

The IVS

SFTB friend Daniela Anavitarte Bolzmann is in the IVS streets this week. Thank you Daniela! Daniela is the founder the founder of Mindful Goods, a boutique Amazon creative studio. Daniela is a digital nomad who lives between Peru & Chicago & launched a puzzle line called the “Lost Walls Project.”

Everyone optimizes the main image. The sale is won after the click, and here's the Claude prompt to fix it.

First some context, last month, I went full nerd and did something I’d been wanting to do for years. I used Claude to analyze 900+ PickFu split testing polls from 34,000 respondents across the 850+ eCommerce brands we’ve worked with. The result was a database that lets me look up trends, spot patterns, and answer almost any question about a client’s creative before we even start designing. This has reframed how my team and I make every creative decision and I’m sharing all of it on Substack at Design Proof. This hack is published here first for the Selling From The Beach community.

Rightly so, many Amazon sellers focus on their main image, and then treat their A+ content like a formality they fill in at the end. I get why. The click. But the click just gets the shopper in the door. Next, sellers think the product image stack is the top are to focus on. This also makes sense because it’s the first potential visuals the shopper sees. 

BUT, and this is a big BUT, in our experience working with 850+ brands, the A+ content, is where they actually decide to buy or bounce. We've put hundreds of real shoppers in front of dozens of A+ layouts on PickFu, and the gap between a good one and a lazy one is not small.

In our database of 1000+ split tests, there are 15 A+ tests across supplements, pet, lighting, honey, and dental, all where one-single-element decided the result more than any other: the hero headline. 

And most brands waste it by restating what the product is, which Amazon already told the shopper up top. Here's the reframe that changes everything: your A+ headline should NOT answer "what is this," it should answer "why should I keep scrolling." 

In our tests, "Natural" beat "Dietary." "Craveworthy" beat "delicious." A specific "the perfect bedtime hot cocoa ritual" beat a generic "works in any drink." In all cases, it was the same product, with a different headline, causing a real swing in votes.

Two more moves showed up in winner after winner… 

First, your strongest number has to be huge. Social proof stats like "14 Million sold" or "84% saw results" only work when they're rendered at display size, big enough to register without stopping to squint. When those same numbers sit at body-text size, shoppers scan right past them, and you get zero credit for your best proof. 

Rule of thumb: if a number is your strongest claim, render it at least 3x your body text. 

Second, your credentials belong in the headline, not buried in a paragraph. "Built by Dental Experts" and "By Birdwatchers For Birdwatchers" drove votes when they were the headline. The exact same claims, sitting in body copy, got ignored. 

Think of your A+ content like a newspaper: people read the headlines and look at the photos, and almost nobody reads the fine print. So put your best punch in the headline. Keep the fine print minimal and digestible.

Here's the AI hack to make this easy on you. 

Hand your A+ content to Claude and have it audit these exact levers before you spend a dollar building a new version. Yes AI can design for you, but IMO it shouldn't. 

AI is genuinely good at catching the lazy headline, the buried stat, and the credential you hid in a paragraph. Below is a condensed version of the prompt we run internally, built from those 15 tests. 

Screenshot your A+ content, paste the prompt here in, attach the image, and run it.

The one thing I'll leave you with: the shopper is scanning, not studying. Your A+ content has about the same odds of being read word-for-word as Amazon’s terms and conditions. So win it the way a newspaper wins it, with the headline and the photos, and put your best proof where a skimmer can't miss it. The prompt above just makes sure you didn't leave any of that on the table.

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Every Employee, AI-Powered, on Your Amazon Account

If you have employees or contractors and you want them making quick changes at scale, you need this one-pager. Inside is the safe way to give your team real API access to your Amazon account without handing anyone your password or your keys: each person gets their own three strings, limited to the permission boxes you tick, revoked with one delete the day they leave. They don't need to code.

They plug the strings into the AI desktop app (Claude/GPT/Gemini) and make changes in plain English: listings, images, prices, inventory. And the money is untoucha

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On The Hometown Road - Saint John, NB

Street Party!

The Local Lowdown is on the road this week. I'm writing from Saint John, New Brunswick, the city where I was born and raised, back visiting my parents.

If you've ever moved away and then gone back to your hometown, you know the feeling. Half of it is exactly how you left it, and the other half makes you do a double take. But the thing that gets me every time is the friendliness. Out east, everyone is polite and just about itching to strike up a conversation. You forget how much you miss that until a stranger in line wants to hear your whole life story.

Outside of family visits, the week has been mini golf, arcades, and even a street party under a fake full moon. We also tried a chess meetup at the public library, but it was a bust. Honestly, the whole library was quieter than I ever remember it being, and it made me wonder how much longer places like that will be around :) We salvaged the afternoon with a family puzzle instead.

Coming home always brings the nostalgia with it. Catching up with old friends (great seeing you Angus), retelling the old stories, figuring out where everybody ended up. At the street party I kept scanning the crowd for a face I might recognize. Then again, it's been 25 years, and some days I barely recognize myself.

The Category Switch to gain a BSR Badge

Last week I posted about how to get a BSR badge. Read here if you missed it. It worked well, almost too well. Sometimes the easiest and most impactful stuff is right in front of you. I have heard some people say that switching your category can hurt your organic rankings. That is true, if the category you switch to is markedly different from your current one. Changing categories is always a risky proposition. But I say why not test it? If it doesn't work or move the needle for you, just change it back. It’s the same as a main image test, as far as i’m concerned.

A friend tried this and got the BSR badge in 24 hours.

Since that post, I learned something the hard way that I have to pass along: not every category actually gives out the badge.

I had another switch lined up last week. Went to pull the trigger and did one last check. The category I was moving into turned out to be a dead one. Amazon has a pile of older categories that still keep a ranked Best Sellers list behind the scenes, but never show the badge on the product page (no idea why these exist, but they do). You can hit #1 in one of those and nothing changes. No orange badge. Nothing a customer will ever see.

So before you switch, do this 2-minute check:

• Open the Best Sellers list for the category you're eyeing and click into the current #1.

• Look at their product page. Are they wearing the orange Best Seller badge? Does the category show up in their Best Sellers Rank section?

• If you see neither, the category is a dud. Pick a different one.

While you're on that #1 listing, look for the "X+ bought in past month" line. That's the floor of what they sell every month. If you can't beat that number, you won't take the badge from them anyway.

One more thing: the switch isn't always instant. If your new category still hasn't shown up after 3 or 4 days, it's stuck. Open a case with Seller Support and ask them to set the category on their end. That's what it took for me.

Now go get your badge.

Is The Flight Going to be Bumpy?

Every flight has that moment. The seatbelt light dings, the plane shudders, and everyone in row 23 becomes briefly religious. 🙏 

Turbli.com fixes the not-knowing part. Free site: enter your two airports and travel day within 36 hours of takeoff, pick your flight, and it gives you a turbulence forecast for your exact route, adjusted for the actual aircraft flying it. For US flights it uses the route and altitude the pilots filed, about 90 minutes before departure. Under the hood it is NOAA turbulence data, recalibrated every day against real measurements from Delta and United planes. So you are reading the same data your pilots brief with, except in your pajamas the night before. Built by a computational fluid dynamics PhD (the exact guy you want on this), used by 200,000 people a month.

To be clear, the forecast does not smooth the air. It converts "what if it is bad" into "light chop for 40 minutes over Colorado," and your brain treats those as two completely different flights.

Enjoy.

To your success,

Rob & Max

Your voice. Every platform. No writing required.

You ghost your own socials by Wednesday. SureThing learns your voice and ships native posts to LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and TikTok, without you writing a thing.

Post in Your Voice

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What, Sh*t Sandwich was Taken?

A guy named Josh Pigford shipped a Chrome extension this week called Knockoff. It filters Amazon search results down to brands people actually recognize. Everything else gets dimmed, hidden, or labeled "No brand." 20,000 people installed it in four days.

The list of brands it keeps is public. Most aren’t on it. Like WNPETHOME, EHEYCIGA, YXYL, LU&MN, JOYIN, TOMY, GODONLIF, YOOJEE, LINGTENG, LANEIGE, VISCOO, BIODANCE, COOFANDY, BALENNZ, TOSY and of course, POOPLUNCH.

The easy read is that this is anti-China. It isn't. Anker sits on the extension's whitelist of established Chinese brands. YXYL gets dimmed. The line isn't where the product is made. It's whether a stranger would recognize your brand.

The app has one job: delete anonymous sellers (what it calls knockoffs) from the page.

And anonymous is how I built my brand. For years Amazon let you win that way. No face, no website, no story. The Prime badge did the trusting for you. A trademark, inventory, and four stars, and you were in business, and not one customer knew who you were.

That era is ending. You can't be anonymous anymore. Shoppers just proved they'll install software to enforce it. AI agents are going to increasingly enforce it by default.

The work now is becoming anti-anonymous. Here’s what to do:

1. Pass the google test. Google your brand plus your category. Something real has to come back: a site, a founder, a Reddit thread. That's the check a curator or an AI runs before deciding you exist. If the only result is your own Amazon listing, you're anonymous.

2. Grow branded search. Recognition has a number: how many shoppers type your brand name into Amazon's search bar. See where you’re at. Do you have packaging worth remembering, an insert worth keeping, a product people recommend by name?

3. Act like a company, not a listing. A real website, real people, an address, emails that get answered. Knockoff has a "Report as a real brand" button. Recognition is crowdsourced now. People vote on whether you're real. Scary.

4. Ask the AI who wins your category. Rufus reached 250 million shoppers last year. Ask it, and ChatGPT, for the best product in your niche. If you're not in the answer, that's the gap the first three moves close. Models learn brands from the same footprint humans check.

Anonymous is over. Would a stranger keep your brand?

The IVS

Big thanks to Ritu Java for sharing this week’s IVS! Ritu is a prominent e-commerce marketing strategist, tech educator, and the founder and CEO of PPC Ninja. On top of that, she lived in Japan for 17 years and is genuinely one of the kindest people you will ever meet.

The AI Relay Race Hack: How I Never Lose a Time-Sensitive Task, Even When My Best Model Taps Out

Here is the main problem with AI coding assistants: the best models are also the hungriest. I run the most advanced models I can, Fable on Claude and Sol on Codex, because they think deeper and make fewer mistakes, but that horsepower burns tokens fast. And it always fails at the worst moment. I was halfway through a time-sensitive build, deadline breathing down my neck, when my premium model simply ran out of runway and stopped. Task frozen. Context gone. Momentum dead.

Here’s a fix. Instead of treating each AI as its own island, I point both assistants at a single shared folder holding one living document I call the handoff file. Every agent has the same two standing instructions baked in: read the handoff file first, and keep it updated as you work. What did you just finish, what is half-done, what comes next, and what does the next model need to know. It is a shift-change log, the same thing a hospital or a factory floor does when one team clocks out and another clocks in. So the moment Fable taps out of tokens, I do not restart and I do not re-explain the project. I point Sol at the same folder, it reads the handoff, and it continues as if it had been there the whole time. Fable stalls, Sol picks up the baton. Sol stalls, Fable takes it back. The work never stops, because the context lives in the folder, not in any single model's memory. This also works great if you have multiple Claude or Codex accounts.

Why this matters, especially for anyone running a business from a laptop and a good WiFi signal, is that it turns a hard ceiling into a smooth relay. You stop being hostage to one provider's limits or one bad token day, and you get the quality of the top-tier models without the fragility of depending on just one. Steal this today: create a shared folder, drop in a file called HANDOFF, and give every AI you use the same two rules, read it first and update it always. Then watch your "I ran out of tokens" disasters turn into a handoff you barely notice.

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The Catalog Compliance Sweep. Every product you sell, checked against the rules that get enforced.

There are more rules touching your Amazon listings than anyone can hold in their head. Chemical warnings, children's product testing, food labels, battery rules, Prop 65, pesticides, and more arriving every year.

I have heard more than my fair share of horror stories: listings taken down over something that could have been caught months earlier, sales gone while the paperwork gets sorted out.

That is what this guide is for. Download your listings report from Seller Central, hand it to Claude with the pdf & prompt, and it scans every listing one by one and tells you if anything might come up: fix this now, check this one thing, or you're fine.

Run the full scan with your Claude/ChatGPT sub and see which of your products are

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CR - Where Everyone Knows Your Name

Took this photo Sunday. Guy in the background…..really looked like Carole Baskin’s (Tiger King fame) new husband Howard…..Just saying its Costa Rica.

Friday night, Marsha and I went out for our usual date night. First things first: if you're not going on a weekly date night with your spouse, start scheduling it now. Don't make excuses. Too busy, too tired, can't find a babysitter. It's only a couple of hours, and those hours matter over the years. Doesn't matter if you have kids or no kids, whether you're 30 or 60. Make it a habit.

So we walked into JP's, a good sports bar and one of those spots where the staff greet us by name. Hugs, fist bumps, the whole thing. And there was a new staff member... JOSE! No idea what his last name is, but he's worked at the Beach Club and Las Catalinas, both places we go. That's the nature of bilingual workers in the service industry here. They move around. Which is great if you're friends, not so great if you've had a disagreement.

Las Catalinas

Just the other day Marsha and I were walking down the beach and a server from the W called out to us. Yep, he used to serve us at Planet Hollywood. It's important in this area to make friends with the staff, know a little about their families, share some laughs. I'm not getting invited to their weddings, but seeing familiar faces when you go out gives you that feeling from Cheers, where everybody knows your name.

That's one of the underrated perks of living in a smaller area. In a big city you can eat at the same restaurant for five years and still be a stranger. Here, you're a regular after three visits. The guy at the fruit stand knows what you buy. The server remembers your drink before you sit down. You run into people you know at the grocery store, on the beach, at the bank (if you have to go…ugh). Some people would find that too small. I find it's the opposite of small. It's a sense of belonging, and no amount of city convenience replaces it. Now that I’ve finished this we are heading to The Shack for lunch and the guys all know what all 4 of us will have to drink!

Strategically Change Your Product’s Category

A 45% traffic bump is sitting one category over.

The Best Seller badge is one of the best badges you can get on Amazon, by far. Profitero measured badge impact across 37,000 products: Best Seller lifts a product's traffic by an average of 45% (the study).

Why it’s so good: the badge shows in search results, where it makes your listing the one orange thing on a page of white tiles. It shows on your product page, where it settles "is this the right one?" before the shopper bounces. And it compounds: the badge brings clicks, clicks bring sales, sales hold the rank that keeps the badge. If one is within reach anywhere in your catalog, it is worth everything in your power to get it.

The opening: While Amazon has bestseller badges liberally across many categories, it doesn’t have them across every one. That being said, it IS in tiny ones. A badge from a tiny subcategory looks exactly the same as one from Kitchen & Dining. You don't have to outsell anyone new, just get filed where you already win.

What to do (do all this with AI, of course!):

• Pull every category your products rank in. Mine came back with 20 categories.

• For each product, ask one question: is there a more specific category it could reasonably fit in? Reasonable matters. A shopper should genuinely expect to find it there.

• Size the gap. Open the target category's public best-sellers page and look at the product in the top spot. My scan found one where a product of mine outsells the current #1 by 5x. But if you’re close to outselling #1, you could switch category, push PPC, and get the badge, then everything is gravy.

• Then the check that saves you from a dead end: confirm the category can actually award the badge. Open that top product's page. Is the orange badge physically on it? Does the category show as a "#1 in..." line in its rank box? Some old categories keep a best-sellers list but never display rank or badge anywhere.

• If the badge shows up there, request the move: edit the listing's item type keyword and make the change.

• Enjoy your new badge!

That's it. What you get on the other side: the orange badge on every search result and on your product page, and the traffic that follows it.

You Probably Already Shop Here, So…

Costco will often rent you the same car for 10-25% less than the rental company will. You pay nothing upfront, and cancellation is free right up to pickup. That combination is the actual hack: book your car now, then re-search the same dates on Costco Travel later.

Rates swing with inventory, and when a cheaper one appears, book it first, then cancel the original (cancelled bookings can't be reinstated, so always lock in the new one before you drop the old one). Travelers knock hundreds off longer rentals doing nothing but this. A second driver rides free too, and they don't even need a membership, which saves the $13-15 a day agencies typically charge to add one.

Better yet, have AI check every day until your trip and continually get the best rate.

To your success,

Rob & Max

Yes, Someone Wants to Buy Your Amazon Business

What happens the day you stop showing up for your business? If the honest answer is that it slowly falls apart, you have built yourself a job, not an asset someone else can take over and pay for. The fix is boring and it works: get what's in your head onto paper, build a small SOP library, make yourself removable. It is the highest-leverage thing you can do before you ever think about selling, and most owners wait until it's too late to matter.

Rob and Marsha help ecommerce owners turn the thing they run into a thing someone else can buy.

Try the free exit readiness scorecard, here:

→ jonescosman.com/exit-readiness-scorecard.html

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What Amazon’s Title Change Really Means

As you probably heard, On July 27, titles drop from 200 characters to 75, and anything still over gets rewritten by Amazon's AI (Find it under “Enhance my Listings”) All of my listings are over (a perfect score, finally 😅). I wrote every bloated one of them myself. Not because I liked them: because a good chunk of rank flows through title keywords.

Nobody wanted 200-character titles. Shoppers didn't. Amazon didn't. Sellers didn't. It was an arms race. Amazon's style guides asked for short titles for years. We all kept stuffing because that’s what worked. You could literally add in your targeted keyword phrase and often watch your rank increase.

So why now? Amazon's own sentence says it: titles should be "consistent with the title length used by other online stores." Amazon wants titles to appeal to every shopper, everywhere. And they want our titles to not look keyword-stuffy and ugly. Why? The same reason as always, relentless focus on customer experience. Everything drives it.

But what does it really MEAN?

Well.. Our four big bets:

1. Reviews and your main image matter even more. When every title is short and looks the same, the title stops being the thing that separates you. What's left on the search page is your image, your price, your star rating.

2. CVR dips, and CTR probably ticks up on Desktop. A fat descriptive title pre-qualified the shopper before they clicked. Take it away and more people click thinking they're on the right product, find out on the page they're not, and leave. More clicks, worse clicks. Mobile probably stays the same.

3. Your brand name is a liability. It goes first and it counts against your 75. If people search your brand, those characters matter. If they don't (like most of us), you're burning scarce space on a word that does nothing for you, and you don't get to opt out.

4. PPC gets more expensive. Fewer keywords per title means more sellers crowding the same high-value terms. Same words, same page, same ad auction.

The IVS

Big thanks to Chelsea Cohen of SoStocked for this week's IVS. Chelsea co-founded SoStocked with her husband, Ari, graduated high school at 15, and is one of the smartest people in the Amazon space. When she speaks, we listen.

P.S. Want to be featured in the IVS? Have a great tip you want others to know about? Reply to this email!

Do You Know Your Greatest Storage Liabilities?

Hey Selling From the Beach! Check out the below video where I break down how to track and identify all kinds of fees from excess inventory (and how to handle them like a pro).

The magic number you need to watch out for is “270.” After that, FBA aged inventory surcharge fees skyrocket. Check out this video where I break down how to find exactly what you’re paying (or are about to pay). Also, how to leverage Amazon’s sales events to move old inventory, and the true cost of liquidations.

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The 5 Second Bundle Calculator That Generates New SKUs to Sell

Some things just go together. Like Coke and lime at a beach bar. And somewhere in your catalog, two products your customers already buy together, one cart at a time, waiting for you to notice.

We built a free tool that notices for you.

Download your All Orders report from Seller Central (two clicks, instructions on the page), drop it in, and it reads the carts: which products keep landing in the same order, and which single products people already buy two and three at a time. That second list is a multipack begging to exist.

Add your Fee

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The Week We Pulled the Plug

This week we took the boys off their devices. There were a few reasons behind it, but the honest one is simple: too much time on them. Day one was rough. Lots of wandering around, but by day two they figured it out, the way kids always do. They were a little crazier with each other, sure. More wrestling, more noise. But they were building Lego, swimming, out on bike rides, and reading a ton (we still allowed the Kindles, since I'm not going to punish a kid for reading). The big surprise was One Piece cards. They'd dabbled before, but this week they went deep into deck building, trading, strategy, grading, the whole thing. And through all of it, Chase still managed to stay in his Christmas PJs almost every single day. It's July. The kid is committed.

Then we forced them out to golf with us after a long layoff. Neither kid even had a polo shirt that fit anymore, so the first stop was the golf shop. We only played 9 holes. Chase played every one of them, and Jax took a couple off, which is fine. What got me was watching them swing my clubs. They've both grown a fair amount since the last time out, and suddenly they're generating real power. Smashing it.

That's the part I keep thinking about. Sometimes kids try something and don't like it, and we chalk it up as "not their thing." But maybe the timing was just wrong. Wrong age, wrong ability, wrong attention span. Golf didn't stick the first time around. This week it looked completely different. Sometimes you need to try it again.

I know we're not the only parents wrestling with this. Screen time is the fight of our generation of parents, and there's no perfect answer. But watching the boys this week reminded me that boredom isn't a problem to solve. It's usually the thing that comes right before they figure out how to be kids again, instead of device zombies.

Does Your Amazon Brand Have a Website?

My friend reminded me this week that my branded website could cost me six figures. Not from bad design or poor conversion. From a lawsuit.

Over 25,000 ADA accessibility lawsuits have happened since 2018. Four firms filed nearly 3,000 of them last year. Settlements run $5K to $50K, sometimes higher. Legal fees stack on top. The ADA requires your website to work for people with disabilities: blind users with screen readers, deaf users, people who can't use a mouse. If it doesn't, you're in violation.

The fix is almost stupid in its simplicity: a plugin. There are thousands of them on Wordpress/Shopify.

Not legal advice obviously, but look into this. It’s extremely common. Stay Safe!

Parking at the Airport?

Book your spot before you leave. Paying at the gate costs 30 to 50% more than if you'd reserved ahead.

When you fly somewhere, parking often gets shoved to the last minute. Your flight leaves in 48 hours, you haven't thought about where to leave the car, so you drive straight to the airport garage, roll up to the gate, and pay whatever the rate is. That's the most expensive way to park.

Use SpotHero or ParkWhiz instead. Both let you search, compare prices from dozens of lots near the airport, and book a spot in a couple of minutes. Both work with the major airports (and hundreds of smaller ones), so odds are good your destination is there.

To your success,

Rob & Max

Everyone who comes to the island leaves it one day.

If you’re new to Selling From the Beach, welcome to the island. The island is the dream that brought you here: your own ecommerce business, run from a beach (or somewhere nice).

Unfortunately, everyone has to leave eventually.

You built it. You live the life you came for. Then one day you exit: you sell the business and sail off to whatever is next.

When that day gets close, don't go wondering what it was all worth. Rob and Marsha are the accountants behind the newsletter, and getting an ecommerce business ready to sell is what they do. Take the free scorecard on our exit page, and let them read your books the way a buyer would.

What you’ve been building is likely worth more than you think.

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I waited ten years for Amazon to pay me daily. It finally turned on last week.

My first was: "I wonder how much more interest I'll earn on this money now that I can get it every day.”

It turns out almost nothing. A week of my sales parked in savings at 2-3% earns rounding-error money over a year. I sat there genuinely excited about a number that doesn't move my life. Time to look deeper.

So all that's changing is the speed at which I get my money. If interest on that money isn't a large amount, then where's the real benefit?

In ten years of biweekly payouts, I'd stopped noticing the obvious: that week of money was asleep. It existed, it was mine, and it just… sat there. In Amazon’s bank accounts. I planned around its absence without thinking about it. I floated inventory buys on a credit card waiting for the next disbursement. I kept a bigger cash cushion than I needed. The constraint was so old I'd built my whole rhythm on top of it.

Here’s the REAL power of getting paid every day: A products business doesn't really run on margin. It runs on how fast the same dollar can go out as a purchase order, come back as a sale, and go out again. Turns, not margin, is the engine. Every leg where your cash falls asleep, on a boat, in a warehouse, in Amazon's account, in a pile of stock that isn't moving, is a leg where that engine runs out of gas. Daily payouts help fire up that engine.

(The fancy term is “Cash Conversion Cycle”)

So is it worth anything to you? Only if you’re using the money quickly. Here’s how:

The IVS

Big thanks to Amy Wees for supplying this week’s IVS! Amy is the founder and CEO of Amazing at Home E-Commerce Consulting and an 18-year Air Force veteran who coaches sellers on inventing and launching private-label products on Amazon. Amy is definitely someone you’d be lucky to know! Shoot her a DM!

Your AI product images look bad because your reference image is bad

Most Amazon sellers blame the AI tool when their generated images come out looking off. Wrong proportions, weird shadows, distorted packaging. The tool isn't the problem. The source image you gave it is.

AI will faithfully reproduce every flaw from your reference image into every lifestyle, infographic, and gallery image it generates. Give it a messy listing photo with bad lighting and a warped product, and you get exactly that, just with a nicer background.

The fix is simple: clean up the reference image before you generate anything. Two prompts in Nano Banana Pro or ChatGPT, using phone photos or your existing listing images, and you can go from a garbage input to a clean, professional product render AI can actually work with. From there, lifestyle images, infographics, and comparison shots come out significantly better.

Once you have a clean reference, there's one more step that makes a big difference: keep your prompt-writing conversation and your image-generation conversation completely separate. It prevents AI from hallucinating product details as the context builds up, which is the main reason image quality quietly degrades the longer you work.

I put the full workflow, prompts, and variations in a free guide with a live demo included.

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Yes, People Can Do That To your Amazon Account

If you haven't checked your user permissions in a few years, you'll be surprised who still has access to your Amazon account. Old VAs. Agencies you fired. Software you stopped paying for. People you forgot you ever let in.

Your Amazon account is likely biggest asset you've got. Losing it to something stupid, some idiot poking around where they don't belong, is one of the most preventable ways to lose your livelihood.

So here's the full guide. Every single place someone can get into your account, and how to see exactly who can do what. Download th—

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The Free Stadium and the Tax-Free Chino Myth

Every place and county has its own folklore. The stories everyone repeats until they harden into a fact. Costa Rica has a good one, and today I'm going to share it…

Maybe you have heard it: China built Costa Rica's national stadium, and in exchange the Chinese don't pay taxes, which is why there's a chino (aka Chinese super market) on every corner. Great story. Mostly wrong.

The stadium is real and we have been there. Jackson stays with his chess team there sometimes and it is a big stadium. In 2007 Costa Rica dropped Taiwan and recognized China. As a thank-you Beijing paid the full cost of around 100 million dollars, shipped in its own workers, and handed over a finished 35,000-seat stadium in La Sabana in 2011. A gift that was never about soccer. It was a billboard to show other countries what switching sides could earn them.

But the tax break? It only covered the building materials for the stadium itself. There is no law letting Chinese shopkeepers skip taxes. Every mini-super pays income tax, sales tax and its patente like anyone else. "Los chinos no pagan impuestos" is folklore, not policy.

So why are there so many shops? The reason is over 150 years old. Chinese laborers came to build the railroad in the 1870s, turned to commerce, and built a grocery tradition passed down through generations. Hard work, not a loophole. Working long hours, starting in small villages and passed down.

The stadium came with a free trade deal, and the trade only runs one way. In 2023, Costa Rica sold China about 400 million dollars and bought back 3.4 billion. The stadium cost China 100 million dollars, once. That trade gap costs Costa Rica three billion every year. Probably why the tax story sticks: a chino on every corner is easier to point at than a line in a trade deal.

So the short-term gift was real. The tax-free chino is a myth. The price was in the fine print.

And I think Costa Rica maintains it now. I have seen the bunk rooms Jax stays in with his chess team, a cross between a university and a jail.

Every Negative Review Removed = 7-12 Five Star Reviews

Last week, eCom triage is Danann Coleman did an AMA in the SFTB Facebook Group! Here is a direct link. He has been selling on Amazon since 2010 and has had more than 4,000 reviews removed for his clients. We had 47 comments in the thread, and there were a few main themes. If you don't have time to read the whole AMA, this is all you really need to know:

1. What actually comes off. Only reviews that break an Amazon policy. Danan figures 30 to 40% of your negative reviews violate something, but he only gets 5 to 10% removed, because one bad sentence buried in a long review won't do it. The easiest wins are fulfillment complaints: melted, expired, damaged, wrong item shipped.

2. The math on a bad review. A single negative can take 5 to 15 positives to cancel out, and every review he removes lands like 7 to 12 five-stars. I used to treat a bad review as weather, something you just eat. Turns out a lot of them break a rule, and killing one is worth more than chasing ten new ones.

3. White-hat vs the stuff that gets you banned. It's a hard line. Official Amazon channels only, and Amazon does the removing, not the service. The only real risk is hammering the same case over and over.

4. Spotting a planted review. He looks for velocity spikes outside your normal pace, the same or near-identical text left on the same day, and reviewer accounts that bomb a bunch of similar products with one-stars.

5. The defense that needs zero help from Amazon. Answer the complaint before it becomes a review. Put your features in the images and the video, not buried in the text. Then run your bad reviews through an LLM (or a tool like VOC AI) to find the complaint that keeps repeating, and fix it at the product or the listing.

One more to watch: Danan heard from Amazon staff in Seattle that they may soon cap removal cases at two filings per review, full stop. If that lands, it gets harder, not easier.

Missed the AMA? Find it here.

Yes, you can book hotel rooms by the hour

You do not have to pay for a full night to use a hotel room. Day-use booking sites sell rooms in daytime blocks, three to eleven hours, at real hotels, for up to 75 percent off the overnight rate. Dayuse.com alone lists more than 9,000 hotels across 29 countries and lets you book as little as one or two hours (HotelsByDay and DayBreakHotels do the same, with rooms in major cities starting around $40).

The catch is that these are daytime windows, not a place to crash at 3am. You check in mid-morning and out by early evening. That makes it ideal for a long daytime layover, an early arrival before your room is ready, a quiet place to work between meetings, or a shower and a nap before a flight out.

The one honest limit: day-use is genuinely a daytime model, so it solves a long layover or an early arrival, not a 3am crash. The exception is Yotelair inside the terminal, which runs around the clock.

To your success,

Rob & Max

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AI is “Confidently” Wrong

Last week I had AI restock my FBA inventory from AWD. It told me every order went through. Two of them hadn't (One was 60 units short and one never shipped). I only found out by accident.

What got me wasn't the failure. Inventory hiccups happen. What got me was the report. It said done, all of them, same as always. 100%!

AND… The report read exactly the same whether the work happened or not.

Thanks, bro

When a person is slacking, you get signals. Work shows up late. Updates get vague. You ask a direct question and get a soft answer. Every instinct I've built as a CEO runs on those signals.

AI gives you none of them. It does most of the job well, and the part it botched sits right next to the rest, marked done (or it fails silently… so annoying!)

I've handed AI real pieces of my business this year. Inventory, ads, reporting. I'm not walking any of it back. But I'd started reading its reports like updates from an employee I trust, and they're not that. It sounded just as sure on the order that never shipped.

So I stopped waiting for signals and started going to get them. Here's what I do now:

• Check the thing, not the chat. The summary is a claim. What actually happened is in the system. Order placed? Open Seller Central and find it. Listing updated? Pull up the live page on your phone. Campaign launched? It's in the ads console or it isn't. Thirty seconds, on anything that touches money.

• Make it show receipts. Stop asking "did it work?" It always says yes. Tell it to go back into the system and pull the current state, fresh. If it can't show you the live result, the job isn't done (see the deep dive below for taking this further)

• Don't let the worker grade its own work. The AI that built the thing will be more likely to tell you the thing is good. Open a fresh chat with no history and have it check, or check it yourself. (see the deep dive below for taking this further)

• Rank by what a failure costs you. You can't check everything. You don't need to. A clunky product description can wait a week. An inventory order that fails costs you a stockout and big $$$.

• Treat silence as a failure. Automations can run out of API credits and just…stop. No error. No alert. If a report you expect doesn't show up, something is broken. Go look.

We turned all of this into a simple doc you can keep: the exact recheck prompt I can paste after tasks, a standing order to drop into your AI's permanent instructions so every job self-reports honestly, and a fresh-eyes prompt that makes a second AI audit the first. Good luck!

The IVS

Big thanks to Michael Shackelford for writing a very interesting tip this week. Michael is the founder of Genrupt.com, an AI content creation platform for Amazon and ecommerce sellers and a former 7 figure brand owner.

New York can fine you $5k for every Amazon image with an AI person?!?

Maybe.

And it definitely seems like they will if they get their way.

The law, which became enforceable on June 9th, requires that if a business creates an ad for a product or service and knows it includes a "synthetic performer," the business must conspicuously disclose that in the ad. And that extends to any type of image in commerce used to sell something. And there’s fines.

So should Amazon sellers be worried?

This isn't legal advice, but here's how I think you should approach it.

Don't panic, but you should be prepared for the day when enforcement and detection of this becomes a real thing. It certainly seems like the canary in the coal mine. We’ll need to be disclosing AI content on every image (I.e. everyone will on every image 🤣)

So do this to ease your anxiety and gain clarity:

1. Carve out at least 10 minutes this week to gather up your active listing images that include an AI person, even if only a finger. Get at least a few listings worth if you have a massive catalogue, just for this exercise.

2. Now you need to apply a disclosure to all of these images. You can have a designer do this for you, or you can use a free tool I built for that here. This tool will let you apply the disclosure to up to 100 images at once. Since the law doesn't define exactly how to say it, you'll have some freedom to choose how to "conspicuously disclose" it. You could say "synthetic performer used", but I'd be more creative if I was you. Maybe something like, "An AI person was used to represent the thousands of satisfied real ones"... you get the idea.

3. Once you apply this to this first batch of images, setup an AB test in Manage Your Experiments in Seller Central. Why? Because you want to know if your customers care or not, and my guess is that they won't care at all. As consumers we are used to this style of embellished advertising, but test to be sure. If anything, AI generated people are going to much more accurately represent someone using your product than the stock photo you photoshopped it onto five years ago.

4. Run your tests until you are confident this doesn't impact your sales, and then just build it into your workflow. It only takes a few minutes to apply it to 100 images. And if for some reason you see that it does hurt your conversions, you get to make another decision, but I think that's unlikely.

Hopefully this gives everyone some direction until we see how the policy and enforcement develop in the coming months. And NO, there is no way to just block an entire state from seeing your ads on Amazon.

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How to get AI to give you the right numbers (Every Time)

As we spoke about in the intro above, AI is often CONFIDENTLY WRONG about what it’s trying to say. It will tell you that everything is A-OK while the house is on fire. One of the most insidious ways it does this is with numbers. And there are a LOT of reasons why AI would think the numbers are correct (when they aren’t).

We built a simple 3-page guide that will force your AI to give you accurate numbers every time. No more messed up spreadsheets, wrong re-orders, or faulty PPC dat

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The Week Was Grad Week in Costa Rica

When you live here and you’re choosing a school for your kids, you quickly realize you need to think ahead, or at least keep your options open, for where they might want to go after graduation. We are trying to keep it as wide as possible given the changing world we live in.

Some international schools have U.S. accreditation. Some offer IB. Others follow the Costa Rican MEP system, which matters if your child might later want to attend a local technical school or university. Some have all of them.

Then there’s the whole grade structure. In some streams, students graduate in 11th grade if they are heading into certain Costa Rican schools. So you end up with graduations from middle school, graduations into high school, Grade 6 to 7 ceremonies, 9th to 10th ceremonies, even though Grade 9 already was technically high school.

It’s weird. It’s confusing. But we show up, take the photos, clap at the right times, and eat the cake.

Happy summer vacation to everyone!

PS: I’m writing this from a hotel room in San Jose, in town for kids chess tournament. The local channels have 6 channels showing various Fast and the Furious movies in English. Similar last night too. I guess they think English viewers love Fast and Furious. Pura Vida.

“Disclosing” AI Imagery is Coming

Originally surfaced by SFTB friend Vanessa Hung, Amazon now makes you disclose whether your A+ Content and Brand Story images are AI-generated. For now that answer just sits as back-end metadata rather than a shopper-facing badge, but it is the future of where AI imagery and marketplaces are heading.

That groundwork lines up with the New York law that became enforceable June 9 (which we wrote about above). It’s a good idea to start getting ready to accurately disclose all the wonderful AI content you’ve created in the last couple of months.

Not Planning on Leaving Any Time Soon?

Some countries and airlines will not let you board or enter on a one-way ticket; they want proof you are leaving. If you do not actually have your next flight booked yet, the usual move is to buy a cheap throwaway ticket and waste the money. There is a cheaper workaround: services like OnwardTicket create a real airline reservation R your name, held in the actual booking systems and verifiable on the airline's website, for roughly $7 to $16. It auto-expires after a couple of days to two weeks, so you are renting the reservation, not buying the flight.

Once you get to Costa Rica, you may not want to leave, HA!

Perfect for digital nomads, frequent travelers, visa applicants or people taking last minute trips.

To your success,

Rob & Max

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The Cat’s Out of the Bag

SFTB Note: We had promised an article written about AI Confidence, but this seemed more important for you to read.

I bought three extra Claude Max accounts ($600USD) for an AI model (Fable 5) I got to use for 72 hours.

It was a nice short story.

Then the US Government took it away. Neither Rob nor I live in the US, by the way.

It was honestly the best AI I've ever touched. Near-zero errors, massive context, & cheap enough that it was accessible for most. Three days. A security flag, some government pressure, and now it’s gone.

In 1920 the US made alcohol illegal. People didn't stop drinking. They built speakeasies (If you’re a SFTB loyalist, you’ll know about the speakeasy I mentioned while visiting Amazon Accelerate in the first ever newsletter). Bootleggers got rich. A bottle behind a locked door got more glamorous than it ever was on a shelf. The ban didn't kill the demand. It advertised it, then handed the whole market to whoever was willing to work in the dark.

Watch it happen now in real time as everyone who got a taste of it tries to get access to some version of it again (below ground). The cat’s out of the bag.

Now, it's only been a few days. It's not permanently banned. The policy might flip again by next weekend. I'm not calling the end of anything. But I know what I felt when the access died. Not "oh well." I felt the pull to go find it again. Banning something throws fuel on the fire.

…and if the US administration believes it can control this, all it will do is accelerate development elsewhere.

That's the part they can't switch off. You can take the model. You can't take the memory of what it could do. And a few million people just got a taste of what the “higher-ups” probably have access to permanently. Three days was the free sample. Now everyone knows it’s real.

The IVS

Big thanks to Rob Cosman for stepping in for this week’s IVS! You can find Rob at the beach, driving his golf cart, building LEGO and enjoying a nightcap as the sun sets (not at the same time).

You Need a Website. Build it Cheap Yourself.

When I receive an email from a new potential client I look at their email and try to open their website. Many have nothing or the worst Wix template ever. That used to make sense, sites were expensive and cash needed to go to other priorities.

That excuse is gone. AI tools like Claude Code will build the whole thing for you while you describe what you want in plain English. You don't need to know how to code. You don't need to know what SEO is. You just need to keep asking it questions.

Do these in order.

Step 1: Get inspired (10 minutes)

Look at what a clean, modern site actually looks like before you build. Browse aura.build and similar AI-built sites. Screenshot two or three you like. You're not copying them. You're going to hand them to Claude and say "build me something with this kind of feel."

Step 2: Pick a domain (let Claude help)

Don't stare at a blank box trying to invent the perfect name. Ask Claude for help: "Here's my brand and what I sell. Suggest 10 available domain name ideas, and tell me which ones are short, memorable, and easy to spell." Have it brainstorm with you until one clicks.

Step 3: Set up hosting and email (Hostinger)

You need somewhere for the site to live, plus a real email address (you@yourbrand.com beats yourbrand123@gmail.com when buyers and suppliers see it). Yes this applies for not just PL brands but those of you trying to get wholesale or brand deals.

I use Hostinger for both. It's about as affordable as it gets and it handles hosting, your domain, and branded email in one place. Get a basic hosting then ask claude to connect to it.

Step 4: Tell Claude Code to build it

Open Claude Code and describe what you want. Something like: "Build me a simple landing page for my brand. I sell [your products]. I want a clean modern look like the screenshots I'm showing you. Include a short story about why I started, my best products with photos, a way to contact me, and all the legal pages I need (privacy policy, terms, anything else). I've never built a website before, so explain each step as you go."

It builds it. Don't like the colors? "Make it navy." Want reviews added? "Add a customer reviews section." Stuck or confused at any point? Type: "I don't understand what just happened. Explain it simply and tell me what to do next." Keep doing that until it's live.

Step 5: Get it online

Ask Claude: "How do I publish this to my Hostinger hosting on my domain?" It'll walk you through it. Ask it to explain anything that doesn't make sense. Connect the API’s.

Step 6: Connect it to Google for SEO juice

This is the step that earns you free traffic, and Claude can set it up for you. Google SEO stuff is kinda complicated, so use claude to do it. Ask: "Help me connect my site to Google Search Console and submit it so Google can find it." Then: "Add the basic SEO so I show up when people search my brand and products."

Step 7: Ask the magic question

When it's all done, ask Claude one more thing: "How do I make this page better?" What are we forgetting? Then do it again next week. That single question turns a basic landing page into a site that actually wins you customers over time.

That's the whole playbook

• Get inspired (aura.build)

• Have Claude research domain names

• Set up hosting and email (Hostinger)

• Ask Claude Code to build the page (legal pages included)

• Ask Claude to publish it

• Ask Claude to connect it to Google

• Ask Claude "how do I make this better?" and keep going

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Sooo… Anthropic released a plugin that scans your project code (any project) and recommends the top 1-2 automations in each of these categories, tailored to what it finds:

• MCP servers — external integrations (e.g. context7 for docs, Playwright for frontend testing)

• Skills — packaged expertise (Plan agent, frontend-design)

• Hooks — automatic actions (auto-format, auto-lint, block edits to sensitive files)

• Subagents — specialized reviewers (security, performance, accessibility)

• Slash commands — quick workflows (/test, /pr-review, /explain)

  
  Now this is pretty cool, but I’m too lazy to do that project-by-project. So we supercharged it. We built it so goes from scanning one project to every project. He

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The Week Costa Rica Tries to Do Everything at Once

This was the last week before school is done, which in Costa Rica pretty much means it is already done. There are technically a few days left next week, but the kids who actually show up will probably spend most of the time cleaning classrooms, playing games, and wondering where everyone else went.

Looking at my photo roll from this week pretty much sums it up. Final school presentations, report cards, final soccer game, ripping One Piece trading card packs, a mini chess tournament, Chase’s First Communion (after three years of preparation), photos of my buddy having to call the fire department to remove a big snake from his house, and a going-away party.

It feels like the whole area tries to squeeze every event into the same week before a lot of families leave the country for a few weeks, or even a month. Lots of people traveling out of the country and for some the CR adventure is over so time to say final goodbyes.

We also had a pretty good storm come through the area this week, with some flooding in spots and some crazy waves at the beach.

Quick word of warning: don’t go swimming right after big storms. All that rain washes a lot of junk down from the mountains, into the rivers, and eventually into the ocean. It can be a recipe for getting sick.

Plug the Ad Leak That's on by Default

Yes, Amazon runs your sponsored products ads on Amazon, on third-party sites and apps, and it's switched on by default. Previously they wouldn't let us turn it off, but as of a recent change they do let us turn it off (thankfully).

I remember looking this up about a year ago and my off Amazon spend was like 2% but yours might be higher. Off Amazon spend typically converts much worse so this is generally for most people something that should be off.

Here's the two-minute fix (or if you’re feeling lazy just get AI to do it)

1. Pull your Sponsored Products bulk file from Bulk Operations in the Ads console.

2. In the Entity column, keep only the rows marked "Campaign."

3. Drop "Update" into the Operation column on those rows.

4. Scroll to the Off-Amazon ad serving column and switch its value to "Limit off-Amazon spend."

5. Paste just those edited campaign rows into a fresh sheet and upload it back.

Voila!

The Same Card You Put PPC On Reimburses Meals and Hotels When You're Delayed

Okay, let’s say you’re stuck at the gate on a 6-hour mechanical delay, you buy $40 of airport food and maybe a hotel, and you eat the cost. You probably did not have to. If you paid for the trip with a premium travel card, it likely carries trip delay reimbursement, and the money sits there unclaimed because filing is not automatic.

Chase Sapphire Reserve (the #1 Amazon PPC card, BTW) kicks in after just a 6-hour delay, or any overnight delay, and reimburses unreimbursed expenses like meals and lodging up to $500 per traveler, per trip. Chase Sapphire Preferred is the same $500 cap, triggered at a 12-hour delay. You file at chasecardbenefits.com and you have to do it within 60 days. You just need to have paid at least part of the fare with the card.

The lever here is not getting the benefit, you already pay for it in the annual fee. It is remembering to file. Snap photos of every receipt during a delay and submit the claim when you land.

To your success,

Rob & Max

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The Most Productive Thing is Unscheduled Time

My job is coming 90% thinking. And I still catch myself wishing my day was 90% doing.

For years, busy meant working. Sourcing products, packing and labeling FBA boxes, driving to UPS, etc. The whole system measured output. I felt better when I was actually moving my body and doing stuff. At the end of the day when I’d shipped off 20 boxes to Amazon I felt like I’d accomplished something big. A good day’s work.

Now, I don’t do any of that. My job is to “think.” It’s to decide strategy. Check PPC, Answer e-mails and fight with AI. That’s what I do now.

So why is it so much more less satisfying than packing boxes? Why do I feel like I’m not moving the needle forward or getting work done?

Maybe that feeling was measuring motion, not progress. It’s easy to see boxes and easy to hold them and send them on their way. It’s not easy to see progress. Especially when you’re in it all day, every day. Even if the thing you did moves the business forward further than packing 20 boxes ever did, it’s still hard to see.

So now I protect the thing that feels the least productive of all: time with nothing in it. Just me and a problem. It feels lazy. But that empty space is where the decisions come from.

The IVS

Big thanks to our pal Chris McCabe for handling this week’s IVS. Chris is elbow-deep in Buy Box suppressions due to external pricing. If you have this issue (and many of us do), give him a call at +1 617 319 8767 or check our eCommerceChris

My F-ing Price Isn’t Competitive?

Amazon's "price matching" teams are stuck in overdrive, as you've probably heard by now. You get told to drop your price to match some random listing their faulty page-scraping found, and it chases the wrong products a lot. In some cases it's a rogue seller creating a fresh listing for your branded item at a steep discount on another platform, just to confuse them.

Amazon’s most insidious “feature”

Whatever the cause, Amazon often grabs inaccurate price info and builds enforcement action around it. Buy Box removals, ASIN takedown threats pending a price change, it's all on the table. You try to counter it, and they threaten to remove any listing that isn't priced equally across every online offer, in accordance with their pricing rules.

For example, one price-match result from their bots might flag your 10-pack because they found a "lower price" on a competitor site for a 2-pack. Yes, it makes no sense. You're ready for an easy, quick fix, and that fix likely isn't coming.

If they keep scraping the wrong quantity, flagging the wrong item, or matching your branded product against a copycat that looks like a counterfeit of your product from marketplaces like Temu, Shein, and the like, don't waste time on Amazon rep calls that go nowhere.

Spend that time better: push Amazon's escalation teams to lean on the "price matching" group. Start by taking screenshots of Google Shopping results for your UPC, circle the correct prices, and show Amazon that the "competitor" they're scraping is an incorrect match. If they force you to open a case, fine, open one, but don't be shocked when you're left waiting or reading copy-and-paste denials.

Jump into escalation mode right now, and understand that means emails to senior management, not "let's hope this next reply works" mode. You'll thank me for it later.

We've handled plenty of these this way, and if one email to one exec goes nowhere, try another. There's no time to waste, or wait, if Prime Day sales are on the line. So why keep calling Account Health over and over, hoping for a miracle cure? Email early and often.

Think You’re late to AI? You’re not.

Every tool that claims it's "fully integrated with Amazon" means the same thing: it hits the SP-API. Which covers about a third of your account.

The other two-thirds is stuck in browser tabs. Coupons. Brand-Tailored Promotions. IP complaints. Reimbursement claims. Premium A+ creation. Subscribe and Save. SAFE-T cases. Vine. No API endpoint exists for any of it. Never has.

This is not a niche problem. Coupons drive launches. Reimbursements claw back five figures a year. IP complaints protect the brand. You've been clicking through all of it manually because there was no other option.

…But there is one. Claude for Chrome sits inside your browser and navigates Seller Central like a user. And there’s a lot of things it can do.

We mapped 95 of them. Documented wha—

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The Beach We Almost Forget Is Famous

Beach is pretty much all small shells.

One of the strange things about living somewhere beautiful is how quickly the amazing starts to feel normal. For us, Playa Conchal is literally the beach right out in front of us. It is the kind of place people plan vacations around, take photos of, and talk about when they get home. But because it is so easy for us to get to, we sometimes forget just how special it is.

The beach is made up of millions of tiny crushed seashells in shades of white, cream, and pink. That is where the name Conchal comes from, and it is what gives the water that bright turquoise look on a sunny day. It is one of those places that reminds me how easy it is to take your own backyard for granted. And I don’t think this only applies to Costa Rica.

Almost everyone has something near them that outsiders would be impressed by. A beach. A lake. A trail. A restaurant. A view. A small town. A farmers market. A piece of history. Something you drive past all the time without thinking much of it.

But someone visiting your area might look at that exact same thing and think, “Wow, you get to live near this?”

That is the reminder for me this week. Don’t wait until someone else visits to appreciate what is already around you. Go see it again with fresh eyes.

For us, that means walking down to Playa Conchal and remembering that the beach made of shells is not just “the beach nearby.” It is one of the reasons people fall in love with this part of Costa Rica and plan their vacations around a visit to it.

Amazon just handed you your customers' entire shopping cart. For free.

Credit: Jordan Gisch

What's offered: From June 1 to December 31, Amazon is dropping the paywall on its paid AMC datasets. The data point that matters most is Retail Purchases. It shows you what your customers buy on Amazon when they're NOT buying from you. Their other orders. The competitors they shop. What they buy right before and right after you.

(There's also more in the release: true customer LTV, organic vs ad-driven sales, survey data, Prime Video and Brand Store insights. All worth a look. But Retail Purchases is the one that prints money, so start there.)

What’s in it for me? You've been guessing what your buyers want next. This stops the guessing. You can see the actual products sitting in their carts alongside yours.

How you make money with it: Find your next product. If a big chunk of your buyers also order the same accessory from a competitor, that's your next launch. Validated demand from people who already trust you.

Steal customers. Build an audience of people who bought your competitor but not you. Run ads straight at them. A real list, not a guess.

How to get in (never touched AMC before?):

1. You need an AMC instance. If you don't have one, request it inside your Amazon Ads account under "Measurement & Reporting." Free to set up.

2. Once you're in, go to the Paid Features page and subscribe. Costs nothing through December 31.

3. Don't know SQL? You don't need to. Use the prebuilt query templates AMC ships with, or ask AI.

Free data that tells you what to launch. Go get it before December 31.

The Extra Airbnb Night That Makes Your Trip Cheaper

Did you know that for some bookings, an auto-discount kicks in at 7 days?

If you’re staying for 5 or 6 days, see if a discount pops up when you select a week.

Say a host offers 25% off the week. 7 nights now costs the same as 5.25 nights at the regular rate, which means booking 6 nights costs you more than booking 7. Always price the night right before each mark (6 vs 7, 27 vs 28) and watch the total drop when you add one.

And a bonus at the 28-night mark. Airbnb sometimes stacks its own monthly savings on top, paid by Airbnb, not pulled from the host's payout. So a listing showing no host discount can still land cheaper at exactly 28 nights. Don't skip the "boring" ones at the monthly mark.

Ten seconds in the date picker. Either you're already optimal, or there's a free night sitting there waiting. Let us know how it works for you!

To your success,

Rob & Max

In Partnership with Seller Sprite

A lot of North American Amazon sellers automatically default to Helium 10.

Honestly, a big reason is because for years it felt like every YouTube channel, course creator, and Amazon guru had an affiliate link for it.

But lately we’ve been hearing more experienced sellers talk about SellerSprite. The keyword research, reverse ASIN data, trend tracking, and product research tools are seriously solid without feeling bloated or ridiculously expensive. If you’ve never tried it before, it’s worth spending an afternoon comparing it against the tools you already use.

Sometimes the best Amazon tools aren’t the loudest ones.

Start your SellerSprite trial today and unlock 35% off here.

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The call I didn't want to make

9K people on LinkedIn are going to write "AI is coming for jobs" this week.

None of them are going to be the one making the call. You will.

I just made it. I fired all 3 of my graphic designers.

Not because they were bad. They were good. They'd been with me for years. The math just stopped working.

Like you (probably), I've been messing around with AI image tools. The first batches were kind of there. Then they got closer. And lately, I think they're finally there (Chat GPT 5.5). The same hero image that used to take two weeks and three rounds of email landed in seven minutes. On-brand. No revisions. I'd spent years building the workflow my designers ran. And keeping it running just became kind of silly.

The math is the easy part.

You run the numbers. You see what AI does before lunch that used to take a month. You know what's coming. Then you have to call a human you know, who has bills and a kid, and tell them the thing they've done for you for years isn't a thing anymore.

It's just a shitty feeling. That's what it is.

Every business owner I know is about to do some version of this in the next eighteen months. Copywriters. Designers. Bookkeepers. PPC managers. VAs. Whole layers of the org chart that don't have a reason to exist anymore.

If you're staring at this decision and like your team, here's what I'd do.

• Tell them early. Give your team the most runway you can possibly give.

• Pay severance. You won't regret the money. You will regret being cheap on the way out.

• Write the referral before they ask for it. The thing you're firing them for is the thing they need to sell next.

• Try and find them a new home. See if your communities, masterminds, or friends need them.

• And most importantly, don't refill the seat. The whole point is the layer is gone.

Your role is also on the list. Mine is too.. get ready.

The IVS

Big thanks to Jana Krekic for providing a great tip this week. You may recognize her name from YLT Translations or her new venture, Seller Lingo. Seller Lingo is an AI platform built to understand Amazon compliance for all countries. Thanks, Jana!

I built an AI agent to babysit my website

Last week my website was down for six hours before anyone told me. A customer DM'd. Then a friend. Then my own mother. By the time I checked, Google had already started downranking me. I've used Pingdom, UptimeRobot, all the usual suspects. They ping every few minutes and email you when the page returns a 500. Fine. But they miss slow loads, broken images, expired SSL, half-loaded pages, content that disappeared. They tell you the lights are on (but they aren’t great at telling you the room is on fire 🔥).

So I built an agent instead. Runs every four hours. Opens my homepage like a real user and checks the response time, the CTAs, the console, the headlines, the pricing. Here's the whole setup:

1. Pick a tool that runs scheduled agents. Cowork has it built in. n8n with a Claude node works. So does a cron hitting the Anthropic API.

2. Write the instructions in plain English. Something like: "Every four hours, visit [URL]. Confirm it loads under 3 seconds and returns a 200. Confirm the headline still says X and pricing still shows Y. Flag broken images, console errors, expired certs, anything off. Tell me what's wrong and what you think caused it."

3. Set the cadence to every four hours.

4. Test it once with a deliberately broken URL and make sure you get a useful reply.

5. Done!

Last Tuesday it caught the next outage. I didn't get an alert that said "down." I got: "Site returned 502 from CloudFront. Origin unreachable. Your host's status page shows an ongoing EU outage. Wait 15 minutes before investigating." That's the line that earned the ten minutes. If your site matters and you're still relying on someone DMing you when it breaks… that is no bueno!

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The Official SFTB Product Launch Checklist

Most Amazon launches don't fail for creative reasons. They fail because of mechanical reasons.

The listing flips live before inventory lands at FBA… The main image isn’t optimized… The PPC starts before the inventory is out of reserved, Brand Registry isn't approved yet, so half the launch surfaces are locked, etc…

Unlock the full deep dive by sharing the newsletter with 1 person.

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Above 👆️ is the “Deep Dive” resource. There’s one in every newsletter. This is unlocked forever if you refer 1 person. It’s easy. Seriously. Just tell 1 person🙂 Your friends will thank you for putting them onto such a good place for Amazon content & news.

(And you’ll benefit from using the resources we share)

Thanks from The Beach!
P.S. Your UNIQUE referral link is below. 👇️ 

The Mystery Snake

Zoom in….don’t worry it won’t bite.

One thing about living in Costa Rica is the country likes to remind you that nature is very much in charge, and this week’s reminder showed up on the side of our house.

A dead snake. You might need to zoom in on the photo, since I wasn’t going any closer.

Long. Smelly. And close enough that I wanted to know what it was, but not close enough that I was willing to do a full investigation.

No idea what kind it was. No idea what killed it. The funny thing is, after a while, you get used to it.

Not totally used to it. I’m not saying I’m out there confidently identifying snakes like Steve Irwin.

But that’s life here sometimes. Beaches, sunsets, monkeys, tropical fruit… and the occasional dead snake reminding you the jungle was here first.

How to Make Your Brand Tailored Promotions as Efficient As Possible

Here's how to make your Brand Tailored Promotions (BTP’s) as efficient as possible. First things first: If you don’t know what BTP’s are, go here.

The Strategy: Pay MORE to acquire hard customers. LESS to acquire easy ones (seems simple, no?) Here’s the mistake I was making: flat discount across every audience. Oops!

Amazon hands you 13+ pre-built audience segments based on real behavior data you couldn't get any other way. Treat them all the same and you throw away the only edge the tool gives you.

Three tiers:

30% off: new and warm prospects

• High potential new customers

• High intent customers

• Cart abandoners (last 90 days)

• Complementary product remarketing

You're buying the first conversion. Same math as paying a high ACoS to acquire a new customer on Sponsored Products. These people have signaled real interest but haven't pulled the trigger. A deep discount pushes them over the edge!

20% off: returning and at-risk

• Promising customers

• Declining promising customers

• At-risk customers

• Declining top-tier customers

These already know the brand. They've bought before. They just need a little nudge :)

10% off: existing

• Top-tier customers

• High spend customers

• Repeat customers

• Recent customers

• Brand followers

These people are already buying. You don't need to discount them at all, but a small reward keeps them loyal without burning meaningful margin. Anything bigger is paying people to do what they would have done anyway.

ANOTHER IMPORTANT THING: BTPs cap at 90 days. Amazon doesn't email you when one expires, there's no SP-API or Ads API to renew them, so you have to manually recreate each one in Seller Central every quarter. AND they take 3-ish days to go live. So, the play is this: 7 days before expiry, set up a new one (for each audience) to start up the day after the original ones end. This way you’re losing zero days while your new BTP’s are set up.

Forget to give the hotel your loyalty number?

The Nobu Ryokan Malibu in California

Forgot to add your loyalty number at check-in? Most chains let you claim the points and elite-night credit after the stay. The windows vary:

• Hyatt: 12 months from checkout. "Past Stay Credit" form lives in your account.

• Marriott: 12 months from check-in. "Report a Missing Stay" sits at the bottom of your Activity page.

• Hilton: 6 months from the stay date.

• IHG: 6 months from checkout.

Before you submit, have ready: hotel name, dates, confirmation number, and a copy of your receipt.

Don't fire the request off the morning after checkout. Wait 5 to 10 business days. Stays often post on a delay, especially international ones. An early request just gets denied.

One trap... none of this works for third-party bookings. Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com... those rates don't earn points or nights. Doesn't matter how nicely you ask. The hotel never receives the loyalty data. Book direct if you want the credit.

Two habits that pay for themselves... save the receipt at checkout, and check your account a week after every stay!

To your success,

Rob & Max