STUMP BEZOS
Amazon said yesterday on its Q1 2026 earnings call that Rufus is attracting more users doing product research, tracking prices and automatically buying at certain prices. What percentage year over year did they say Rufus usage is up?
[ Answer at bottom of email ]
👀 JOHN ASPINALL’S CODEX DEMO BLOWS THEM AWAY
If you’re not a Billion Dollar Sellers Club Member (BDSC), you are missing out on exclusives like this ( try it for just $9! and watch all the replays )
Yesterday inside BDSC, John Aspinall showed exactly why he switched from Claude Code to OpenAI Codex for image-heavy work in the last 48 hours.
His take: if you do anything visual, Codex is now the unlock because of the new ChatGPT image model. If you don't touch creatives, stay on Claude Code.
What Codex did live, in two prompts for an Amazon listing:
Took an Amazon listing (kids' electric toothbrush) → built an image strategy → generated the full image stack on-brand, product-accurate, no hallucinations, even reordered images for conversion.
Spotted that the brand wasn't using its own brand font/colors and corrected it.
Replaced harsh red-X comparisons with grayscale (better psychology than red Xs on a product page).
Generated a full A+ content premium layout in 7 minutes — designer-level output. John's note: at his agency this is multiple days of designer time.
Built brand guidelines from scratch off just a website URL or a few screenshots — color palette, gradients, typography, tone, do's & don'ts, icons, hero examples. Use this when a client has none.
Built a brand store layout module by module from a website.
Generated YouTube thumbnails (16:9), TikTok/Reels assets (9:16), 2000x2000 image stack assets — granular pixel control (e.g. 1464x600 specifically).
Built consistent character sheets — front/side/back of "Suzy" — so every future iteration (Suzy running, Suzy at the gym) stays on-brand.
Why Codex over Claude Code right now:
Claude doesn't have an image model. You'd have to call Nano Banana or wire in an external API (~$0.06/image, plus the disconnected workflow).
ChatGPT Pro = $100/mo, same price as Claude Pro. John burned ~19% of his rate limit doing 2 image stacks + an A+ project + a brand guidelines build. Doesn't hit limits the way Claude does on image work.
Codex generates Notebook LM-style decks → exports as .pptx → opens in Canva, PowerPoint, Keynote.
Has computer use built in — can be told "on the 24th, open Senja, download all videos, drop them in this folder, then run this workflow."
Automations are native — say "make this run every 6 hours" and it converts the workflow without cron jobs or hooks.
Codex tips John shared:
Memory: Settings → Personalization → enable memories, including "augment memories with screen context." Codex learns from what's actually on your screen as you work.
Skills: Codex supports them, but the trigger is $ not / (no idea why).
Stack them: Use Claude Code inside Codex. Let Claude Code execute, let Codex be the QA / final say. Best of both.
Run on medium intelligence (5.5) by default. Extra-high + fast eats your rate limit but ships fast on labor-intensive jobs.
If you’re not a Billion Dollar Sellers Club Member (BDSC), you are missing out on exclusives like this ( try it for just $9! and watch all the replays )
Click here to join the AI Amazon PPC Challenge now
^ Learn to use Claude Cowork and other agentic AI tools to take over whole roles inside your Amazon brand ^
Get a library of plug and play Claude skills and copy-and-paste prompts ready to use right away.
See the exact AI agents and workflows 8 figure sellers are currently using inside their brands.
🔭 YOU GOTTA SEE THIS
Love this newsletter!
Marketing Misfits: Chris Gray on Why AI Agents Are About to Kill Your Business
Local marketing expert Chris Gray joined Kevin and Norm for an episode packed with brutal warnings and unconventional tactics.
The big alarm: Google is shifting to an agentic AI model. Search engines will soon book appointments and make purchases for customers through Google's Universal Commerce Protocol. If your business runs on a basic website and organic search, you're about to get steamrolled.
Key takeaways:
Your Google Business Profile is the new homepage. Treat it like an SEO goldmine. It now matters more than your actual website.
Always have an event. Posting an "Event" or "Offer" on your GBP forces the algorithm to weight your listing above competitors.
List hours as 24/7. AI agents recommend open businesses. Closed competitors get skipped during off-hours.
Norm's geo-targeting trick. Press releases targeting cities under 350,000 population can rank you #1 on Google in 24 hours.
The Apple Wallet hack. Use SendPush.io to get into customer digital wallets and send three lock-screen push notifications per day.
The Caller ID hack. Chris broke through a gatekeeper and landed a massive local client by simply changing his caller ID name.
Lock customers into clubs. Take past customers off the market with subscription memberships, especially for slow seasons.
Bottom line: optimize for AI agents now or get left behind.
Listen to the full episode and subscribe to the Marketing Misfits Newsletter at misfits.news.
🌎 INTERESTING STATS
🤠 THE MEGA EARNINGS AGENTIC ECOM SHOWDOWN
Per Scot Wingo of Retailgentic
In a first-ever moment, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft all reported earnings inside a 120-minute window yesterday. Agentic commerce was THE story.
Here's what sellers need to know.
Wall Street Scoreboard (after-hours moves)
Google: +7% (clean beat and raise, ~5 Targets worth of market cap added)
Amazon: roughly flat
Microsoft: muted
Meta: -7% (the loser on sentiment)
Agentic Commerce Mention Count
Amazon won the unscientific "agentic commerce" mention scoreboard with the most call-outs across press release, prepared remarks, and Q&A. Total mentions across all four companies: 20.
Google: UCP Is Winning the Standards War
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) just added Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe to the Tech Council. Founding members: Shopify, Etsy, Target, Wayfair, Google.
Translation: UCP is steamrolling OpenAI's competing ACP standard.
Ulta Beauty just launched agentic commerce inside AI Mode, Search, and the Gemini app — using Google as their on-site agent partner. Sephora and Macy's are next.
New ad format being tested: shows retailers selling products that AI Mode organically recommends.
Philipp Schindler's pitch: "You no longer have to choose between speed and certainty."
Seller takeaway: If you're a brand on Shopify, the rails to agentic checkout are being laid right now. Get your product data clean.
Meta: Zuck Goes Off-Script on Shopping
Partnership Ads run rate doubled YoY to $10B.
Affiliate partnerships rolling out on Facebook (and testing on Instagram) — creators tag products, earn commission. This is TikTok Shop's playbook.
Zuck's bold claim: no other AI lab is building "an AI that's really good at shopping." He sees it as core to "personal superintelligence."
Hinted at future monetization via commission structures or premium tiers.
Susan Li's reaction to Zuck's 4-minute monologue: "Gosh, I almost wish we could end on that answer."
Seller takeaway: Meta is signaling a creator-driven, affiliate-powered commerce stack. If you sell DTC, the creator-tagging path on FB/IG is about to get a lot more interesting.
Amazon: Rufus Is Going Bananas
Three fresh Rufus datapoints from Jassy:
115% growth in monthly active users
400% YoY growth in engagement
20% of shoppers who interact with a Brand Prompt convert with that brand
Other highlights:
Amazon joined the UCP alliance and dropped 8 new Rufus features right before the call.
Jassy thinks Rufus will be "the best shopping assistant anywhere."
He's bullish on ads inside agentic commerce: sponsored prompts, multi-turn conversations creating multiple ad surfaces, AI-built creative slashing time and cost for SMBs.
The one frustrating bit: Jassy still describes "horizontal agents" (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.) as having bad pricing and product info. Someone at Amazon needs to hand him a 6-pager — that's not the current reality.
Seller takeaway: If you're not already optimizing for Rufus (A+ content, structured product data, brand prompts), you're leaving conversion on the table. Sponsored prompts are the next PPC frontier.
The Big Picture for E-com Operators
The standards war is mostly over — UCP won. Build for it.
Rufus is converting — the data Jassy is hinting at is clearly strong enough to make him giddy.
Ads are coming to every agentic surface — sponsored prompts on Amazon, retailer ads in AI Mode, commission models on Meta.
Creator + agentic commerce are converging — Meta's affiliate push plus AI shopping agents means creators become a discovery layer feeding agent-driven checkout.
The investment pace isn't slowing — heading into Holiday 2026 and a potential IPO season (SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic), the big three are all-in.
If you sell on Amazon, DTC, or both, agentic commerce is no longer "coming." It's the quarter that just got reported.
🐶 RUFUS JUST GOT 8 NEW FEATURES: STRATEGIES CHANGE
Andy Jassy dropped a number on the Q4 2025 earnings call that should have stopped every Amazon seller cold: Rufus is now in front of 300 million active customers and is already pulling roughly $12 billion in downstream transactions.
And just yesterday, he said usage is up 400% year over year.
Then, days before the recent UCP announcement, Amazon quietly rolled out a flood of new Rufus features on the About Amazon blog. Eight of them. Seven are personalization plays. One is fully agentic. Together they change what a "search result" actually is.
Together they change what a "search result" actually is.
If you only read one newsletter this week, make it this one. Here's the breakdown, plus a tip from Amy Wees that almost nobody is using yet.
The Big Picture: Same Keyword, Different Results
Before the features, understand the shift.
Two shoppers type "storage bins" into Amazon right now. They get different products back. Same keyword. Different results. And you have no idea which result your ASIN showed up in, or whether it showed up at all.
Why? One of those shoppers told Rufus, "I have three kids and a small apartment." The other said, "I run a minimalist home office." Amazon's own interface now confirms it in plain text: as you shop or chat with Rufus or Alexa, Amazon saves helpful information to personalize your experience. Live. Today. On every search.
Your listing was built for a keyword. Rufus is now reading it against a person.
That single change is the lens through which to read all 8 features below. Bullet points, A+ content, backend keywords. They all just picked up a second job: identity matching.
The 8 New Rufus Features
1. Scheduled Actions (the agentic one)
Tap the new plus box in Rufus (yes, the same UI metaphor ChatGPT made standard) and you get Scheduled Actions. Pre-canned prompt pills include things like "recommend a new coffee variety every month," "alert me to new books by my favorite authors," "set a birthday reminder with gift ideas," and "save money on cleaning supplies."
Two catches.
One: Amazon will only run a scheduled action once per day. So when you ask for an "immediate" in-stock alert, immediate means "tomorrow morning, maybe."
Two: this is the first time Amazon has moved past responding to a query and started acting on future intent. Gift planning happens before the event. Restocking runs on a schedule. Essentials move toward automation. The system now does the work on the shopper's behalf.
You can ask Rufus "show me my current actions" any time and it manages the list. Alerts arrive by email.
2. Persistent Account Memory
For all the time Rufus has been in market, it never had real access to your order history. That just changed. Rufus is now faster at finding an order than the order history page itself. "What was that black thing I bought in February?" finds it. No specifics required.
3. Personalized Deals
Rufus now reads your wish list, browsing history, and past orders. Ask "what are the best deals for me?" or "are any items on my wishlist on sale?" and you get a personalized cut.
4. Custom Shopping Guides
Ask a high-level question. "What do I need to start a video blog?" Rufus pieces together a kit, removes anything you already own from your purchase history, and gives you a buy plan with the gaps filled in. This one is going to eat a lot of category top-of-funnel content.
5. Easy Reorder
"Reorder dog treats." Or "reorder everything I used to make pecan pie." Rufus loads the cart. Done.
6. Shop Direct Inside Rufus
Hard to recreate this one in the wild yet, so Amazon's stock screenshot is the only public look so far. The signal is clear though: Shop Direct (factory-to-consumer) is being plugged into the Rufus chat surface.
7. Compare with Similar
A new prompt pill on most PDPs (and you can ask manually any time). Rufus generates a side-by-side comparison matrix against similar products.
The feature itself is great. The execution is hobbled. The Rufus gutter on a desktop PDP is roughly an inch wide, which means you're scrolling sideways through a comparison table that should fit on a screen.
Stitch the screenshots together and you see what Amazon clearly intended: a clean comparison grid. The UI is going to need to grow up before this one lives up to its potential.
8. Personalized Product Summary
Another PDP prompt pill. Rufus summarizes the product specifically for you, drawing on what it now knows about how you shop, what you've bought, and what you've browsed.
Putting the 8 Features Together
Seven of the eight are personalization. One is agentic. All eight share the same Amazon strategy: single-directional embrace and extend.
UCP lets Amazon super-set inventory but in a pull-not-push model. You can shop everything on Amazon. Amazon doesn't push your data outward.
Personalization features are the same play with shopper data. Your order history, your wishlist, your past Rufus conversations, your browse history, all Amazon exclusives.
Gemini doesn't get them. ChatGPT doesn't get them. (If you connect your Gmail to a third-party AI that scrapes your Amazon emails, sure, there's a back door. It's nowhere near as clean as what Amazon has on you natively.)
Microsoft did this to Netscape. The question is whether Amazon can do it to OpenAI, Google, and the agentic shopping wave coming at the gates.
The One-Question Listing Audit You Can Run Right Now
Pull up your top ASIN. Read the first bullet point. Ask one question:
Does it name a type of person, a use case, or a life context?
"Ideal for pet owners." "Built for small home offices." "Perfect for parents managing school-day chaos." Those are identity hooks. Rufus has profile types on file. Your bullet either matches one or it doesn't.
If your bullet just describes a feature and stops there, Rufus is holding your listing up against its profile library and getting no match. You're invisible to the shopper your product was actually made for.
The fix is not "stuff more keywords." The fix is to rewrite bullets, A+ copy, and backend signals so Rufus can map your ASIN to a real shopper profile, not just a search term.
The Amy Wees Tip Almost Nobody Is Running
BDSS Dream 100 member Amy Wees flagged something most sellers are sleeping on.
She put it like this:
"You now have access as a marketer to data about conversations that customers are actually having about their mindset."
The play is simple. Open Rufus on one of your products. Ask:
Why do people buy this product?
What do they buy instead?
What do they wish it did?
Who is this product for?
Take Rufus's answers. Paste them into ChatGPT. Ask ChatGPT to generate 20 deeper, hyper-specific questions a real buyer would ask before purchasing in your category. Then take those questions back to Rufus.
You now have the literal conversations your customers are having while making the buying decision. Not a survey. Not a focus group. Not a guess. The mindset data. Marketing has always been psychological. Until last quarter, you had to infer the psychology. Now you can read it.
Loop that into bullets, A+, backend, ad copy, and PPC negatives. That's how you close the gap between a keyword listing and an identity listing.
🔥 MORE HOT PICKS 🔥
🥃 PARTING SHOT
“You can’t control how you feel. But you can always choose how you act.”
✌🏼 Have a great weekend.
See you again on Monday.
The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
Rufus usage is up 400% year over year
