STUMP BEZOS
You sell a 4-pack of taco holders on Amazon for $25. Each holder fits 3 tacos. Amazon takes a 15% referral fee and $5.25 in FBA fees, and your landed cost is $4. How much profit do you make per taco?
[ Answer at bottom of email ]
💰 AMAZON to LET YOU PAY to GET UP to 1,000 REVIEWS
For years, the only way to get more reviews was to ask nicely and hope (or play the blackhat game). You hit the Request a Review button, perhaps did Search-Find-Buy or Rebates, maybe enrolled in Vine, then waited.
That changes this month. Amazon Ads just announced Review Requests, a new ad type built into Amazon Ads Agent. It shows a review ask to people who already bought your product. The ask doesn't come in an email they'll ignore. It shows up on Amazon's busiest pages, like the homepage, while they're already shopping.
You set it up like any other campaign. Pick a budget. Set your bids. Let it run.
How it works
A verified buyer opens Amazon and sees your Review Requests ad
They leave a star rating with one tap
If they want, they keep going and add a written review with photos or video
In early tests, products got three times as many ratings and reviews per week as they did before the test. Reviews live on your detail page, so every shopper who lands there sees them, not just the people who saw the ad.
The fine print
Open beta, US only, starting late October 2026. More marketplaces are planned.
Sellers and vendors both qualify, as long as your ad console account is in good standing with no active policy violations.
The product needs fewer than 1,000 total ratings and reviews. Amazon checks when you build the campaign and keeps checking while it runs. Once a product hits 1,000, its campaign pauses on its own.
You get to it through Amazon Ads Agent or the Amazon Ads Unified API.
So this is a launch tool. Amazon basically said: "Need social proof faster? Cool. You can advertise for that too."
The catch nobody's talking about
Review Requests gets you more reviews, faster. Whether they're good reviews is still up to your product.
If something's off with your product, this speeds up the bad news. A lukewarm buyer who never would have bothered to review now gets a one-tap prompt on the homepage. Congratulations, you just paid for a three-star rating.
Amazon also hasn't said how the ad is billed. Watch the math closely once you're in.
What to do before the beta opens
Pull your list. Every ASIN under 1,000 ratings and reviews is a candidate. New launches and listings that stalled out at a few dozen reviews go first.
Check product health. Open your Voice of the Customer dashboard and your return reasons. If buyers are complaining, fix the product or the listing before you push for reviews. Only run this on products you'd bet on.
Clean up your account. Any active policy violation locks you out.
Get comfortable in Ads Agent now. Don't spend launch day learning the interface.
Start small and track two numbers: new reviews per week and cost per new review. Compare them to what the free Request a Review button already gets you.
Keep the free stuff running. This stacks on top of Request a Review and Vine. It doesn't replace them.
Reviews have always been the slowest part of a launch. Amazon just turned the ask into ad inventory. The sellers who show up on day one with a solid product and a tight budget will be stacking social proof while everyone else is still waiting on follow-up emails.
🌎 INTERESTING STATS
🕹️ YOUR EMAIL LIST is NOW AMAZON AD TARGETS
Using your own customer data in Amazon Ads used to require a DSP commitment, a data partner or a developer. Not anymore.
Amazon opened Ads Data Manager (ADM) to all advertisers in 30+ countries. It works with Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display. No DSP budget required.
Your Shopify buyers, email subscribers and loyalty members can now become audiences Amazon targets, excludes or models from. You still pay for clicks. The price of admission is what changed.
Most sellers let Amazon's algorithm decide who's valuable. Great for scale. Weak on control. ADM lets you hand Amazon a seed built on real customers, so its machine works from your definition of valuable.
4 Plays to Run
Retarget DTC buyers. Bought on Shopify, never on Amazon? That's a retargeting segment now.
Clone your best customers. Seed with repeat and top-LTV buyers, not every freebie opt-in.
Stop paying for people who already bought. Exclude recent purchasers, refunds and unsubscribes from acquisition campaigns.
Split the list. VIPs, first-time buyers, lapsed buyers (180+ days) and never-purchased subscribers each get their own segment.
Set It Up in 5 Steps
Pick one question. "Can our top 20% of DTC customers find new Amazon buyers at a margin we like?"
Build a clean seed. Emails, plus phone and address. More identifiers mean a higher match rate.
Upload it. Ads Data Manager > Datasets > Upload dataset. Choose AUDIENCE and set the country code where the data was collected.
Check the match rate. Not every email matches. ADM shows accepted vs. rejected records.
Refresh daily or weekly. Lists go stale, and stored data expires after 13 months.
Reality Check
No DSP doesn't mean no setup. You need a manager account, accepted ADM terms and a data source.
Only upload what your consent covers. Your privacy policy has to support ad use.
Amazon says advertisers using first-party data saw 30% higher incremental ROAS. That's Amazon grading its own homework. Run your own test.
Your 30-Day Test
Run three segments side by side:
A: Repeat buyers (2+ orders or above-median LTV)
B: Recent DTC buyers
C: A holdout on your current targeting
Judge new Amazon customers, CAC and margin. Not just attributed ROAS.
Your customer list was always your best ad asset. Now you can use it without a DSP check. Feed Amazon your best buyers. Exclude the rest. Measure like a skeptic.
🛠️ BDSN SOFTWARE TOOL of the DAY 🛠️
Which of your two Amazon businesses is losing money?
A consumable brand is two: new customers you buy with ads, and repeat orders that ship anyway. Amazon blends them into one TACoS. Demian runs My Real Profit, analytics built for consumable brands. He showed me a $6.3M brand, split:
- 12% TACoS overall, 49% on new customers
- 29% margin overall
- $199,742 lost on new customers in six months
His team is auditing this split for a limited number of BDS readers.
Check yours: myrealprofit.com/bds
🚀 5 RANKING MISTAKES THAT BURN YOUR INVENTORY
Alina at The Ranking Pill sees the same five ranking mistakes again and again. Each one wastes units, budget or both.
1. Chasing the biggest keyword
A keyword with 140,000 monthly searches looks like money. But you're fighting 4,000 competitors, and only shoppers with exact intent convert. Your units get eaten by noise.
Fix: Rank the cluster: the root plus two long-tails with the same intent. Put 60% of your units on the root and split the other 40% across the long-tails. The cluster moves together and pulls the root with it.
2. Spreading units across too many keywords
You pick 12 keywords, split the budget evenly, and nothing moves. The algorithm needs a concentrated burst of velocity before it registers a signal. Twelve tiny nudges won't do that.
Fix: Pick 3 keywords from the same cluster and commit the units.
3. Ranking before the listing is ready
Weak images, loose bullets and a main photo that doesn't sell. Rank jumps for a week. Then Amazon sees the low conversion rate and pulls you back down. A campaign amplifies whatever your listing already does, good or bad.
Fix: Get real images, clean copy and a main photo that stops the scroll. Bring organic CVR up to a healthy level first. Then push.
4. Bad timing
Ranking takes weeks to lock in. The first two weeks move the rank. The next four build organic sales on top of it. If you start when demand peaks, you're already too late.
Fix: Work backward from your peak and start 8 to 10 weeks early. For Q4, rank in August and September. For back to school, rank in April and May.
5. Stopping at Page 1
You hit Page 1 in 10 days and stop the push. Two weeks later you slip. Amazon sees velocity drop suddenly and adjusts your rank.
Fix: Taper instead of stopping. Cut the daily push by about 30% for one more week and let organic sales take over.
These mistakes feed each other. A bad listing makes bad timing impossible to recover from. Spreading units thin usually starts with chasing volume. Fix the mistake that hits closest to home first, and the rest gets easier.
Restock Planner: Your inventory sweet spot
Reach page 1 on Amazon simply by sending free products to Micro-Influencers
Use the platform Stack Influence to automate Micro-Influencer product seeding collaborations at scale (get thousands of collabs per month) and increase your Amazon ranking, generate UGC, and boost up 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.
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Don't believe it? Check out the results from the Blueland Micro Influencer campaign which generated a 13X ROI scaling up influencers on Amazon.
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🗜️ AMAZON JUST HANDED the BARBER THE SCISSORS
Sponsored Ads auto-optimization hits the U.S. in January. It's the Meta model: the platform sets your bids and budgets for you.
So now the barber decides your haircut. The company selling the ads decides how many you buy.
At unBoxed last week, Amazon announced it's retiring the Ads Console. Sponsored ads and the DSP are merging into one platform called Amazon Ads Agent. You tell it what you want in plain English. It plans, builds, optimizes and reports.
What's changing
Amazon DSP is now DVA (display, video, audio). In the default mode, DVA+, Amazon's AI runs the optimization. A toggle under advanced settings keeps manual control.
Full-Funnel Campaigns. You set one budget and add products. Amazon handles targeting, creative and pacing across sponsored and DVA inventory.
Branded Conversations. Your Sponsored Brands ad becomes a back-and-forth chat inside Alexa for Shopping, built from your catalog, guides and images. You pay only for the first prompt click. U.S. launch is in January.
Plain-English reporting. You can pull nearly 1,000 metrics with no SQL.
Simpler also means less visible. When one agent plans, buys, optimizes and grades its own homework, you see a budget and a result. Everything in between gets harder to check.
And Amazon is doing this while the FTC and state AGs sue over allegedly hidden auction surcharges. Amazon disputes the claims. Trial is set for next year.
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🔥 MORE HOT PICKS 🔥
🥃 PARTING SHOT
“I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong … I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.”
✌🏼 See you again Thursday …
The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
$1 per taco. Take $25, subtract the $3.75 referral fee, $5.25 FBA fee and $4 landed cost, and you have $12 left. That's 4 holders x 3 tacos, so 12 tacos, which works out to $1 each.
