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STUMP BEZOS
According to venture capital firm a16z, as of April 2026, what percentage of US households pay for an AI service like ChatGPT or Claude?
[ Answer at bottom of email ]
👀 OWN AMAZON.COM/CATEGORY before YOUR COMPETITION
Type amazon.com/candles into your browser. You don’t land on a search page. You land on Hemlock Park’s Brand Store. Try amazon.com/supplements. That’s Wild & Organic’s store. amazon.com/light goes to Daphino.
BDSS Dream 100 member Vanessa Hung of Online Seller Solutions calls it claiming the aisle. Picture walking into the pasta aisle at the supermarket and seeing your brand name on the sign overhead.
Here’s how to do it on Amazon.
What it is
Amazon lets Brand Store owners request a short custom URL. Most brands use their brand name. The smarter play is a category word your customers already say.
One word. One store. Whoever claims it first owns it.
Why it matters
It sticks. “Go to amazon.com/supplements” works on a podcast, a box insert or a billboard. Nobody remembers a long store URL.
It’s scarce. Each word can point to only one store. Once a competitor grabs yours, it’s gone.
It skips the competition. The link drops shoppers into your store, not a search page full of other brands.
The difference it can make
Amazon’s own data on shoppers who visit a Brand Store vs. those who don’t:
New-to-brand shoppers are 62.7% more likely to buy and spend 72.3% more per order.
All store visitors show 53.9% higher purchase frequency, a 52.1% higher add-to-cart rate and 71.3% higher average order value.
A short, memorable URL is the easiest way to push more people through that door.
How to do it
Get your Brand Store live and approved. Short URLs point to the store homepage only.
Pick your word. A category word (candles), a playful word that fits your brand (penguin for a kids’ toy brand) or your brand name. Shorter is better. Type amazon.com/yourword first to see if it’s taken.
Open a support case in the Amazon Ads console. Not Seller Central. Go to Help > Contact us > Stores.
Give them three things: your brand name, your current long store URL and the short URL you want.
Wait 24 to 48 hours. Vanessa has done this many times and says approval is easy.
How to track it
Add ?channel= plus a tag to every placement so each one gets its own numbers:
amazon.com/supplements?channel=podcast for podcast show notes
amazon.com/supplements?channel=insert for a box insert QR code
amazon.com/supplements?channel=creator_mia for a creator’s bio
Tagged visits show under “Your tags” in Stores Insights. People who type the plain URL land in “Other sources.” Check that line before and after you start promoting it.
How to leverage it
Package inserts. Print the short URL and add a tagged QR code.
Podcasts and video. Say it out loud. It’s short enough to remember without a link.
Creators. Give each one their own tag so you know who actually drives traffic.
Everywhere else off Amazon. Social bios, email signatures, your website, packaging, trade show booths.
Paid traffic. Where you want the Brand Referral Bonus, keep using Amazon Attribution links. Use the short URL where people need to remember it or type it.
Every category word can go to only one brand. Check yours today.
Selling from outside the USA?
Selling from outside the US?
There is now a compliant way to sell on TikTok Shop US through your own US company, 100% owned by you. No borrowed identity, no shared login.
Dan Ashburn walked through exactly how it works in a live session, and the replay is now up.
Watch it here
🔭 YOU GOTTA SEE THIS
90% of e-commerce websites are beautifully designed, incredibly expensive, and completely invisible to Google and AI search bots.
For the last two decades, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was about stuffing keywords and building links to rank on Google. Today, artificial intelligence has completely rewritten the rules.
In this episode of Marketing Misfits, hosts Norm Farrar and Kevin King chat with technical SEO mastermind Jono Alderson (former head of SEO for Yoast). Jono breaks down the brutal reality of what Google and AI engines (like ChatGPT and Claude) actually look for in a website today.
Discover why 90% of business websites are technically broken, why your "483 cookie-cutter blog posts" are destroying your rankings, and why Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) means AI is no longer just crawling your site, it's judging your brand's entire reputation across the web.
🌎 INTERESTING STATS
🤖 CHATGPT RECOMMENDS 3 BRANDS - BE ONE of THEM
Ask ChatGPT for the best product in your category. It won’t give you ten blue links. It names two or three brands. Everyone else is invisible.
That’s the warning from Dan Ashburn of AEO Engine, an SEO veteran since 2002. His numbers: Google organic converts around 1.8%. ChatGPT traffic, around 16%. Pink Stork pulled $222,000 in attributed revenue from ChatGPT and Perplexity in about six months.
Even if you live on ads, shoppers check you in AI before they buy. Dan calls it the shadow funnel. You can shape what it says.
1. Find your starting line
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude “best [product] for [customer].” Whatever they say is where you start.
Then check whether robots.txt or Cloudflare is blocking AI bots. Cloudflare may do it by default. Is your site copy real text, or buried in code the bots can’t read?
2. Get indexed beyond Google
Each AI pulls from a different index. ChatGPT leans on Bing. Claude uses Brave. Perplexity has its own. Most sellers have never set up Bing Webmaster Tools. Do it today.
3. Write one sentence. Paste it everywhere.
“[Brand] makes [product] for [customer].” Same wording on your site, LinkedIn, social bios and every directory listing. AI trusts consensus. Make it easy.
4. One page per question
Pull your buyers’ questions from Google’s “People Also Ask” box. Start at the bottom of the funnel. Build one page per question. Answer first in two or three sentences, then add numbers and sources. Use your customer’s words, not your jargon. Add comparison tables. AI lifts them straight into its answers.
5. Multiply every answer
Record a five-minute video per answer. Put the transcript in the YouTube description.
Post the same answer on LinkedIn.
Turn answer pages into podcast episodes with NotebookLM. Distribute them with Transistor (about $20).
6. Build the consensus
Send a press release at least once a quarter.
Get on the “best of” and top 10 lists AI already cites. Many will add you for a couple hundred dollars.
Answer real questions on Reddit and Quora.
Put a real name, photo and LinkedIn link on your content.
7. Keep it fresh
Every 90 days, rewrite about 30% of your key pages. Changing the publish date alone doesn’t work anymore.
Watch the full breakdown below..
🛠️ WHICH of YOUR AMAZON BIZ is LOSING $ 🛠️
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.
🛒 HOW STICKER BOX CRACKED TIKTOK & WENT VIRAL
In July, Stickerbox’s TikTok Shop was doing about $3,000 a month. On October 1, it did more than $50,000 in a single day.
Same product. Same price point everyone says is too high for TikTok Shop.
Here’s what changed.
The product
Stickerbox is an AI sticker printer for kids. It’s a 3.75-inch red cube that looks a bit like an Etch A Sketch, with one big button and a small screen.
Here’s how it works:
A kid holds the button and says an idea, like “a lizard riding a skateboard.”
AI turns it into black-and-white line art.
Seconds later it prints a real sticker, ready to color with the pencils in the box.
It prints on BPA- and BPS-free thermal paper, so there’s no ink to buy.
It’s designed so a 3-year-old can use it and an 11-year-old still wants to.
The idea started when co-founder Bob Whitney used ChatGPT to make a coloring page for his son, and the boy kept asking for more. It’s made by Hapiko, a Brooklyn startup led by Grailed founder Arun Gupta. It launched in November 2025 at $99.99.
A hot launch, then a stalled shop
The launch was huge. House of Marketers ran the creator and paid media push across TikTok and Meta:
$100K+ in revenue in the first 10 days
$300K+ in 90 days
6X blended ROAS
3M+ views
25+ creatives tested
Sold out 4 times in the first 3 months
It helped that the product is the content. Kid talks, box thinks, sticker prints. Before launch, a Tom’s Guide editor with about 50 followers posted her kids using it. Millions of views and 1,000+ waitlist signups followed.
But launch hype doesn’t keep a channel growing. By July 2026, the TikTok Shop was stuck at about $3K a month.
Bullseye Sellers then stepped in and found three problems:
Shipping delays had tanked the shop health score.
The storefront didn’t explain what the product does.
The price sat far above TikTok’s impulse-buy zone.
What Bullseye did
1. Fixed the foundation. Inventory back in stock. Orders shipping on time. A storefront that explains the value in seconds.
2. Put samples in the right hands. Creators whose audiences already pay for quality, “chosen by data, not follower count.”
3. Found the angle, then flooded it. Tracked which videos turned into orders, cut the rest and put every creator and ad dollar behind the winners.
Then it went viral
On October 1, Shop TODAY named Stickerbox Best Creative Tech Toy in its 2026 Best Toy Awards. Bullseye says the TODAY feature called it possibly “the most viral toy this holiday season.”
That day the TikTok Shop did over $50,000. The brand’s own website sold another 1,000 units.
The results
TikTok Shop, July 7 to October 4, 2026:
$367,480 in revenue
4,180 units sold
$88 average selling price
99.6% of revenue from affiliate creators, not the brand’s own account
Separately, in August, Spin Master (PAW Patrol, Etch A Sketch) agreed to buy Hapiko in a deal reportedly worth $35M to $50M. That’s about nine months from launch to exit.
Bullseye’s says “A high price is not a reason to stay off TikTok Shop. It just takes the right creators and the right content. And there is a lot less competition up there.”
The must-have toy of the season
Now everyone wants one. The USA Today calls it “now-elusive” and possibly “the toy of the 2026 holiday season.” It’s out of stock on Amazon, and direct orders ship weeks out.
🔥 MORE HOT PICKS 🔥
🥃 PARTING SHOT
“You don’t learn to walk by following the rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.”
✌🏼 Have a great weekend.
The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
Only 2.2% of US households for an AI tool subscription
