Amazon Marketing Cloud used to be an enterprise toy. It opened to every seller in mid-2024 and sits inside Seller Central today, and by Abe Chomali's count fewer than 1% of sellers have touched it.

Abe co-founded RightClick Advisors and runs ads on accounts up to $20 million a year. His recent BDSC training went deep. These are the two moves from it you can finish before lunch.

What AMC is:

It's Amazon's data clean room. You query the shopper data Amazon already holds on your ads (who clicked, who bought, how long they took, which ad types they touched on the way) and you can turn that data into custom audiences with their own bid modifiers.

Amazon normally credits only the last click. AMC shows the whole path. It doesn't replace daily campaign management. It sits on top of it.

Find it: Advertising Console, Campaign Manager, hover over the left sidebar icons until the menu slides out, then Measurement and Reporting, then Amazon Marketing Cloud.

One check before you start. You need 500+ clicks or impressions on your ads (2,000+ for the advanced queries), more than one ad type running (Sponsored Products, Brands, Display), and steady sales. If all you run is auto Sponsored Products, AMC has nothing to work with yet.

Switch one: the built-in audience (five minutes)

Go into your existing campaigns and add Amazon's default audience called "Shoppers More Likely to Purchase" with a 10% bid modifier. Amazon builds that audience from its own purchase-behavior data. You don't have to. Abe sees a measurable lift on most accounts from this alone, and almost nobody has it on.

Switch two: a cart-abandoner audience (twenty minutes)

Retargeting is where everyone should start, and cart abandoners are the highest-intent slice. They almost bought.

1.     In AMC, click the Audiences tab, then Create Audience, then New Query.

2.     Pick your active storefront (not a legacy one) and country. Choose Rules-Based as the audience type. This can't be changed later.

3.     Name it the way you name campaigns and write a plain English description. You will forget what it was in six months.

4.     Set Auto-Adjust Date to Yes so the window rolls (last 30 days) instead of freezing on a fixed date.

5.     Click Generate SQL with AI. Type something like "create an audience of shoppers who added this product to cart in the last 30 days but did not purchase." Review what it produces, paste it into the SQL field, and click Create Audience.

6.     In Campaign Manager, open one of your best-performing campaigns. Bid Adjustments, Audiences, Custom audience created in AMC, pick yours, set +15%.

7.     Launch on a Monday so you can watch it all week. Never on a Friday.

Then wait. Compare two-week windows against the two weeks prior, never day to day. If it works, add one more audience the following week: previous purchasers inside their repurchase window (the best ROI of the bunch), then page viewers who never added to cart (lower intent, spend moderately).

Two audiences that pay for themselves

Deal seekers. AMC can build an audience of shoppers who only buy when a coupon or lightning deal is running. Leave it dormant 364 days a year. The day a deal goes live, turn it on. Showing those people ads on a normal Tuesday is money on the floor.

Exclusions. Amazon knows which shoppers are serial returners and habitual one-star reviewers. Exclude them and your ad spend stops subsidizing your worst customers.

The rules that keep you out of trouble

Start at 10 to 20%, never 200%. Modifiers stack multiplicatively on top of your top-of-search and placement adjustments, so a 50% placement bump plus a 100% audience bump gets expensive fast. One audience in one campaign first. Don't spin up a separate low-bid campaign with a giant audience modifier; it cannibalizes your main campaigns and kills velocity.

And name your campaigns properly before you run a single query. AMC reports by campaign, and "Campaign 47" tells you nothing. Abe's format includes the ASIN, a short product descriptor, ad type, brand or non-brand, and target ACoS, so a 20% ACoS reads instantly as good against a 22% target or bad against a 9% target.

His team took a $20 million account up 5 to 8% in the first 30 days of doing this with discipline. Switch one takes five minutes. Go flip it.

The full AMC training, the campaign naming framework, and build steps for all six audience types are inside the Billion Dollar Sellers Club, alongside the monthly expert calls that keep updating this stuff. Try it for $9

Amazon announced Friday that Alexa for Shopping (AFS) is now available over text. It’s a small rollout for now, with a wider release coming in the next few weeks. For sellers, the bigger story is what happens when the shopper never sees a product page.

What Amazon launched

Use cases Amazon highlighted

The hero image shows a lasagna dinner order, so grocery is clearly a priority. Expect it to get heavy focus.

One conversation, everywhere

Conversations carry across text, the Amazon Shopping app, Amazon.com, and Alexa devices. Start researching a gift in a text, finish checkout at home. Order updates and deals will eventually land in the same thread.

What this means for sellers

The “remembers preferences” detail matters most. If a shopper’s vegan preference isn’t explicitly stated in your product data, AFS may never return your product. The product data can be a deal-breaker, not just a conversion factor.

Here’s how the risk builds across channels:

What to do now

Amazon’s Fees and Ads Are Nearly Matching Its Own Retail Sales

In Q3, Amazon collected $66.1 billion from seller fees and advertising, equal to 96.6% of the $68.5 billion it made selling goods itself. A year earlier that ratio was 89.3%.

Prime Day moving out of Q3 this year flatters the comparison, but across Q2 and Q3 combined, the gap still halved, from $12.7 billion to $6.2 billion. Amazon’s original business is close to being overtaken by what it charges sellers and advertisers.

Retail has fallen from about half of Amazon’s revenue in 2021 to 38.8% over the trailing twelve months. Fees and advertising have held at 33.3%, the same as in 2024, and AWS has taken the share that retail gave up.

On trailing numbers, the two lines would cross around spring 2028, later than projected. The holiday quarter will likely reopen the gap first, since it favors retail.

Amazon is now more often your vendor than your competitor. Its fees buy demand, logistics, and ads you’d otherwise have to find elsewhere. Walmart’s ads are growing faster than its sales, TikTok Shop takes creator commissions, and DTC brands pay Meta for traffic.

Headline rates don’t compare across these channels. Contribution margin does: what’s left of a sale after fees, ads, and fulfillment. Know that number by channel so you know where the next dollar of inventory and ad spend should go.

Kevin King on “AI Is an Amplifier, Not a Destroyer” (Retail Playbook podcast, hosted by Andrew Bell of ReFiBuy)

Watch this if you want to see how an operator with 30 years in Amazon uses AI day to day, not just how he talks about it. Three reasons stand out for BDSN readers:

He also makes the case for “agentic commerce optimization” (ACO) on top of SEO and AEO, and floats the idea of separate “agent versions” of brand sites with their own agentic terms of service, similar to robots.txt.

✌🏼 Here’s to your success …

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