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STUMP BEZOS
59% of marketers say email is their highest ROI channel. What percent of ALL online orders can be attributed to email marketing?
[ Answer at bottom of email ]
💰 NEW ANNOUNCEMENT for ECOM MASTERY in NASHVILLE
Summary of what you'll learn from the 41 speakers at Ecom Mastery Ai featuring BDSS:
AI-Powered Selling — Master the tools, tactics, and systems reshaping how products get discovered and bought
Multichannel Domination — Scale across Amazon, Shopify, TikTok, Walmart, and YouTube like a unified machine
Advanced PPC & Advertising — Next-level ad strategies for 7- and 8-figure sellers who refuse to plateau
Product Launch & Selection — Find winners before you spend a dime and launch them with unstoppable momentum
Brand Building & Protection — Own your brand story, crush hijackers, and maximize your exit value
Email, UGC & Influencer Playbooks — The off-Amazon revenue engines most sellers are leaving on the table
AI Avatars, AEO & Conversational Commerce — Be THE answer when Rufus, Cosmo, and AI assistants recommend products
E-commerce Finance & Exit Strategy — The math, margins, and moves that turn revenue into real wealth
Psychology, Persuasion & Video — Sell with emotion, convert with science, and stand out in every scroll
Sourcing, Outsourcing & Scaling — Go from $1M to $10M with smarter systems, not more hours
🌎 INTERESTING STATS
🕹️ AMAZON + SHOPIFY NOW 50% of ALL U.S. E-COM
Here's a number worth sitting with: according to Marketplace Pulse, Amazon and Shopify together now account for roughly 50% of all U.S. e-commerce. That’s about $440B and $168B respectively out of a $1.2 trillion market.
That's up from 43% just four years ago, and the acceleration has been dramatic over the last two years.
Shopify publicly claiming 14% market share (up from 12% last year) is a big deal. Shopify isn't a shopping destination. Nobody "goes to Shopify" to buy something.
It's infrastructure powering millions of independent storefronts. The fact they're now framing themselves in market share terms tells you how massive DTC has become as a channel.
Shopify's global GMV is now 66% the size of Amazon's entire third-party marketplace.
This reinforces what we've been saying (and is the theme of EcomMastery Ai featuring BDSS in Nashville in April): the smartest Amazon sellers aren't choosing between Amazon and DTC, they're doing both.
Amazon owns the customer relationship on its platform; Shopify lets you own yours. Two different models, both growing, and together they're squeezing everyone else.
Speaking of everyone else: the other half of U.S. e-commerce is getting crowded and scrappy. Walmart's marketplace is still relatively small compared to Amazon (~$80B GMV). eBay found its lane with collectors and enthusiasts ($39.1B). TikTok Shop hit $15.1B in just its second full year, real money but still tiny compared to the leaders.
Temu and Shein lost their de minimis shipping advantage. Target's marketplace has really never gotten off the ground.
U.S. e-commerce has organized itself around two models: Amazon's centralized marketplace and Shopify's decentralized infrastructure. If you're not building ideally on both of these, you're fighting for scraps in an increasingly contested other half.
🛠️ BDSN SOFTWARE TOOL of the DAY 🛠️
Today’s feature is not about a tool itself, but a warning to be aware of when choosing the tools you use on Amazon.
Amazon just updated the Business Solutions Agreement with a brand new section 19 effective March 4, 2026, and added a brand new AI Agent Policy.
Amazon Now Has a Name for Your Software: "Agent"
If software does something on your behalf on Amazon, Amazon now calls it an Agent. That Agent must identify itself as automated, not pretend to be a human, and not bypass CAPTCHAs or dodge rate limits and blocks.
Automation is allowed. Hiding it isn't.
Repricers, monitoring tools, research tools, browser extensions, VA dashboards, agencies logging in and anything that touches Amazon on your behalf counts.
Your Account, Your Problem
The account is yours. What touches it is your responsibility. Not the vendor's, the agency's, or the developer's. Yours.
Amazon doesn't have to prove you built the tool or that you knew how it worked. If it's tied to your account, you own the exposure. That's why this update matters even when you "just use a tool."
AI and Data Mining Rules Got Tighter
Amazon also spelled out that you can't use Amazon's materials or services to build or improve AI or ML models, and tightened the rules around data mining and reverse engineering.
Tools that rely on heavy scraping or extraction are now in a much smaller gray zone. The contract removes the ambiguity, and when the rule is written clearly, Amazon doesn't need to argue about it.
What to Do (No Panic Required)
You don't need to rip out your stack. You need to stop assuming. Ask your tool providers three questions:
How does a tool access Amazon, via official APIs or browser automation?
Does it run while I'm logged in?
Does it ever bypass CAPTCHAs, limits, or try to look human?
If they can't answer clearly, that's your answer. If they say "don't worry, we're compliant" but can't explain how, treat that as a signal.
🚀 AI’S INFLUENCE on SHOPPING is BIGGER THAN THOUGHT
Kiri Masters dropped an important piece last week that every seller needs to understand. We all keep hearing that "less than 1% of website traffic comes from AI referrals," but that number is basically meaningless.
Here's what's actually happening: Shoppers are using ChatGPT and other AI tools to decide what to buy before they ever visit Amazon, Walmart, or any retailer.
They photograph their room and ask ChatGPT for furniture ideas. They ask which brand of protein snack to grab off the shelf. Then they go buy it. The retailer sees zero browsing history, zero search data, zero upper-funnel signals. It just looks like a direct purchase.
Malte Landwehr of Peec AI calls this "Dark Search" — the AI version of dark social. One company found that only 1% of clicks came from ChatGPT, but 20% of new leads said they discovered the brand through ChatGPT. The dashboards can't see it, but the influence is massive.
Assistants influence more than they transact. Rufus may tag a tiny share of Amazon’s GMV directly, but it is quietly reshaping how shoppers decide and convert.
The real disruption isn't agentic checkout inside ChatGPT (that's still clunky). It's that the discovery and consideration phases where shoppers decide WHAT to buy and WHICH brand are migrating to AI tools.
If your brand isn't showing up in LLM recommendations, you're losing sales you'll never even know about (DragonFish can help with that).
About 10% of product discovery is already happening via LLMs. And watch this space: Target Roundel is already testing ads inside ChatGPT where brands and retailers co-bid together. That's likely the future of retail media.
If you're waiting for AI traffic to clearly show up in your analytics before you act, you're already behind. Start optimizing for AI visibility now.
Today at 3pm CST exclusively inside Billion Dollar Sellers Club
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.
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 2026!
Get 10% OFF by signing up this month
🛍️ REDDIT TURNS RECOMMENDATIONS into SHOPPING
Reddit just announced it's testing a new AI-powered shopping feature directly in its search results. When users search for product recommendations like "best noise-canceling headphones," they'll now see interactive product carousels with pricing, images, and direct buy links all pulled from real Reddit conversations and discussions.
Right now it's a small U.S. test limited to consumer electronics, but the direction is clear: Reddit is turning the millions of authentic product conversations happening on its platform into a shoppable experience, powered by their Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) partner catalogs.
Reddit has quietly become one of the most influential platforms in product discovery.
Google already prioritizes Reddit results in search (you've seen those "reddit" queries dominating SERPs), and now Reddit itself is cutting out the middleman by keeping shoppers on-platform and connecting them directly to retailers.
This is another signal that where people discover and research products is fragmenting fast. It's not just Amazon search, Google, TikTok, and ChatGPT shopping anymore, Reddit is entering the chat (literally). The platform's superpower is authentic user-generated recommendations, which carry enormous trust with buyers.
If you're not thinking about your brand's presence and reputation on Reddit, you're missing a channel that increasingly influences purchase decisions before shoppers ever hit Amazon.
Between Google's AI Overviews pulling Reddit content, ChatGPT citing Reddit threads, and now Reddit building its own native shopping experience, the communities talking about your products are becoming the storefront.
Keep this on your radar. What starts as a small electronics test today becomes a full-blown commerce platform tomorrow.
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🥃 PARTING SHOT
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
✌🏼 See you again Thursday …
The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
23% of all online orders can be attributed to email
