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  • [ BDSN ] 🏴‍☠️ Amazon just changed the rules again - and brand owners take the hit

[ BDSN ] 🏴‍☠️ Amazon just changed the rules again - and brand owners take the hit

April 24, 2025

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STUMP BEZOS

Meta took in $18.35B in ad revenue from Chinese companies last year. How much does Meta expect to lose due to Temu, Shein and others cutting ad spend?

[ Answer at bottom of email ]

👀 JOSH HADLEY’S BDSS XI WINNING TIKTOK PLAYBOOK

BDSS Dream 100 Member Josh Hadley watched his Amazon best-sellers slide to position 5, margins get crushed by low-priced overseas rivals, and cash-flow dip so badly he had to fund payroll from his personal account.

After hearing two podcast interviews with stationery brands crushing it on TikTok Shop during a late-night drive to his hockey league, he took it as a sign to pivot.

Within six months the pivot had revived his catalog—products that were down 50 % are now up 5× year-over-year—and it delivered a new six-figure Shopify channel with 20 %+ net margins.

You can watch his entire award-winning presentation (and 40 others) if you snag the BDSS XI Iceland replays - just released today.

Here’s a short partial summary of his “Affiliate-Army” system (rest is in BDSS replays):

🏴‍☠️ AMAZON JUST CHANGED the RULES AGAIN

Amazon Just Changed the Rules Again — And Brand Owners Take the Hit

Amazon’s updated counterfeit policy now forces a brutal choice:

If your product listing is hijacked by counterfeiters, Amazon requires you to report the entire ASIN — not just the bad sellers.

That means you’ll have to take down your own listing just to fight fakes.

No more buying a unit and showing how it is different to Amazon for removal.

So what are your options now?

  • Leave your listing live and let counterfeiters flood it, race prices to the bottom, and kill your margins.

  • Or nuke the whole ASIN, lose your rank, and start over from scratch.

Either way, Amazon wins:

  1. More resellers = more sales (even if they’re fake), while your brand value tanks.

  2. More brands forced into Transparency, a program Amazon conveniently makes money from.

Sure, Transparency only costs $0.01–$0.05 per unit right now ... but when has Amazon not used a foot-in-the-door strategy to jack up fees later?

Welcome to the new game: protect your brand or pay to play.

75% of shoppers don’t go past the first page of Amazon when searching. How do you outrank your competitors?

To beat out your competitors in 2025 it’s necessary for Amazon brands to heavily invest in external traffic strategies.

One of the best external traffic platforms is Stack Influence which uses A.I. and a dedicated community to automate thousands of collaborations per month to help you increase your Amazon external traffic, generate UGC, and scale your recurring revenue like never before.

Top Amazon brands like Magic Spoon, Unilever, and MaryRuth Organics have been able to get to #1 page positioning on Amazon and increase their monthly revenue as high as 13X in as little as 2 months.

  • Pay influencers only with products (stop negotiating fees)

  • Increase external traffic Amazon sales (get to top page rankings)

  • Get full rights image/video UGC (build your brand with authentic content)

  • 100% automated management (don’t lift a finger to get influencer collabs at scale)

Don't believe it?

Check out the results from the Blueland Micro Influencer campaign which generated a 13X ROI scaling up influencers on Amazon.

After successfully raising investment on Shark Tank Blueland turned to Stack Influence to boost their Amazon sales and become a top selling listing using Micro Influencer marketing.

Increase your Amazon listings ranking for targeted keywords and multiply your organic recurring revenue in 2025!

🌎 TOP TRADING PARTNERS of THE UNITED STATES

Note: Ireland inbound is primarily pharmaceuticals

💝 AMAZON RELEASES MORE DATA INSIGHTS to SELLERS

From Jeff Cohen | BDSS Dream 100 Member

Two big moves just shook the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)—and if you're not paying attention, you're about to get lapped by brands who are.

#1 5-Year Purchase History Is Now Unlocked

This is the kind of data we’ve dreamed about—Amazon just made 5 years of customer purchase behavior available to everyone inside AMC.

When Jeff looked at the data from a major CPG brand, the contrast was jaw-dropping:

  • 1-Year View: 37% repeat purchase rate, $24 average GMV

  • 5-Year View: 85% repeat rate, $185 average GMV

See what happens when you zoom out? With this, you can now:

✅ Map out long-term customer value
✅ Track lifecycle and product sequencing
✅ Spot year-over-year seasonality
✅ Build smarter bundles and cross-sell flows


#2 Formerly Paid Features—Now on the House

Amazon just removed the paywall on several AMC capabilities. Most notably, Amazon Insights is now included. This tool gives you crystal-clear visibility into:

  • Media exposure

  • Shopping behavior

  • Purchase trends

  • Audience segmentation (for future targeting or suppression)

Translation: you’ll finally see what’s resonating with your best customers—and use it to scale what works while cutting what doesn’t.

Next Steps?
If you’ve never tapped into AMC’s 5-year view, or want to start segmenting smarter audiences, talk to your Amazon Ads PDM—or your AMC tool provider (Perpetua, Intentwise, etc.). Don’t wait on this.

This is your edge—don’t let your competitors grab it first.

AI PRODUCT IMAGE TUTORIAL

Here’s how to use ChatGPT 4o to create product image compositions.

Take a look at the prompt below, and note the number of reference images uploaded.

And here is the result:

Want AI to produce real-looking photos? No “shot on DSLR” or “cinematic lighting” is required in the prompt.

Instead, use a random camera-style file name in your prompt. Something like: IMG_190282009.HEIC That’s it. Drop that in front of your description (no image upload necessary).

Why this works: AI models are trained on real images, including files from digital cameras, which come with the default filenames.

When you include one in your prompts, the model thinks it’s a real-life photo and taps into the part of its training data that looks more like actual camera output.

For example, a prompt like “Mountain landscape from the perspective of a hiker drinking from a Yeti-style water bottle in digital camera style” would generate something pretty, but it would still have an AI feel.

Change it to “IMG_190282009.HEIC mountain landscape from the perspective of a hiker … ” and you get a sharper, more photorealistic image that looks like a snapshot.

It works on people, too.

⚒️  PARTNER with 1000s of CREATORS at TOUCH of BUTTON

Lyra by AMT.ai can handle top-of-funnel creator seeding for your products.

  • Finds aesthetic-aligned creators

  • Writes personalized outreach

  • Manages follow-up and replies

  • Coordinates shipping

Lyra searches over a billion signals and 100m+ creators to find creators that will make sales for your brand. Then Lyra uses AI to check each creator’s content against 150+ criteria — so you never have to scroll through hundreds of profiles again.

Lyra uses AI to personalize every interaction with each creator—making sure they love your brand, and want to partner again and again. It writes emails, negotiates contracts, closes deals, ships products, sends follow-ups, and pays creators automatically with AI.

🔥 MORE HOT PICKS 🔥

🥃 PARTING SHOT

“While you're building your empire, don't forget to build memories. Because one day, the chance to create them will be gone.”

Jesse Itzler

✌🏼 Have a great weekend.

See you again on Monday.

The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
Meta could lose $7 billion due to the tariiffs