[ BDSN ] OpenAI vs Amazon WAR begins (marketplace bombshell)

Scot Wingo & Financial Times just exposed OpenAI's secret marketplace plans. Merchants getting orders, OpenAI taking cuts.

July 17, 2025

Watch the replay - All Day Workshop is this Sunday!

STUMP BEZOS

How many shipping containers were lost at sea in 2024 (it was more than twice as many as in 2023, and only 35% were due to weather)?

[ Answer at bottom of email ]

If there’s a Queen of Amazon, Athena wears the crown.

She’s the kind of person who organized her first community at the age of four, naming it “The Original Dolphins” and, naturally, making herself its princess.

Ever since, she's been unstoppable, building communities, changing lives, and creating magical experiences for entrepreneurs everywhere she goes.

Athena didn’t start her career selling spatulas online; she began with Hollywood glitz. Growing up in LA, her parents were artists, and she found herself orchestrating red-carpet events, seminars, and career-building workshops featuring A-list celebrities.

But when motherhood arrived, Athena knew the all-nighters and lavish Hollywood parties had to pivot into something more manageable yet still impactful.

That's when Amazon knocked on her door, courtesy of Ari and Chelsea Cohen (who later went on to form SoStocked). They were quitting their full-time jobs and selling kitchen products online.

Athena laughed at first, but soon, she wasn’t just selling yoga headbands on Amazon; she was inspiring a legion of mothers through her Facebook group “Ladies with Babies” to start their own journeys.

A few years and countless success stories later, Athena had created not just a business but a movement.

But she didn’t stop there.

Seeing a gap in sourcing education, Athena launched China Magic, a transformative 12-day sourcing trip to the Canton Fair. Think expert sourcing guides, insightful factory visits, and masterminds led by the top minds in the Amazon industry.

Kevin and Athena at the Carnival of Dreams during Sellercon

Athena is the kind of leader who remembers your kids’ birthdays, mentors you through midnight crises, and then celebrates your victories like they were her own.

In 2019 Athena teamed up with Dream 100 member Dan Ashburn, merging her community-building superpowers with his strategic brilliance. Together, they built the 700+ member strong Titan Network, empowering sellers to achieve massive success, not just financially, but personally and professionally.

Athena’s magic isn't just in her business acumen. It's in her unstoppable positivity, relentless energy, and genuine heart for helping others succeed, bringing entrepreneurs together across continents, and creating magic everywhere she goes.

Athena with the Titans in Cancun

Today, we officially welcome her into the Dream 100.

Not just because of the communities she's built, the stages she's lit up, or the fortunes she's helped others earn, but because of who she is: authentically Athena, forever the connector, forever the creator of magical moments.

Welcome to the Dream 100, Athena. We've been waiting for someone exactly like you.

🏪  HUGE NEWS: CHATGPT to BECOME an ECOM MARKETPLACE

It’s coming in time for Holiday 2025!

Scot Wingo and the Financial Times broke the news yesterday that ChatGPT is secretly previewing a checkout feature. They are planning to "take a cut of ChatGPT driven sales" (eg. BECOME A MARKETPLACE), possibly even with the anticipated release of its agentic browser.

Here are some tidbits:

  • Merchants will receive and fulfill ‘paid for’ orders (i.e. a marketplace!)

  • OpenAI will take a ‘cut of sales’.

  • They are already making presentations and discussing financial terms.

  • Shopify is somehow involved, it’s not clear if they are powering the COMPLETE checkout (Shop Pay), or just speaking with Shopify’s existing merchants.

This is the first domino to fall in the world of AI shopping, bypassing traditional search.

Scot wrote this in RetailAgentic newsletter:

“You know that Amazon and eBay, maybe even Walmart and Target won’t participate in this. BUT what about their marketplace sellers?

Hey! We sent you $X in sales down on the <insert marketplace incumbent> marketplace through our ChatGPT shopping feature. Our analysis shows that if you listed your products DIRECTLY on our platform you’d see a 50%+ lift in GMV. Oh yeah, you are currently paying 14-17% of sales, we’re going to charge 10% - and no listing fees or any of that mess. You’ll increase sales and profits, want to sign up?

Everyone thinks of Shopify as a SaaS company, but of their ~$9B/yr in revs, 75% are merchant services. The biggest piece is payments.

Yes they arm the rebels, but most of the rebels don’t realize they are paying Shopify $6.7B as a payment processor (yes 70% of Shopify’s revenue comes from this).”

If you want to standout, we have this new ability called sponsored products that, without changing the LLMs recos at all, when you do show up, it gives you the ability to stand out a bit and say more to the audience. We call it ChatGPT Retail Media Network. (RMN is $60b for Amazon and there’s another $100b rattling around).”

It’s about to get really interesting in the world of AI and e-commerce.

If you’d like bleeding-edge help for your brand in ecom AI optimization & AEO, get on the waitlist for DragonFish.



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🔭 YOU GOTTA SEE THIS → A MUST WATCH AEO EDUCATION

Kasim has more data than anyone on how AEO works. This is worth watching if you want to survive the shift.

🌎 STATS YOU SHOULD KNOW

🛍️  AMAZON PRIME DAY 2025: KEY SELLER TAKEAWAYS

Triple Whale analyzed data from over 3,500 brands, revealing critical shifts in Amazon Prime Day 2025 performance compared to 2024. Here’s what sellers need to know:

📦 Orders Skyrocketed, but AOV Plummeted

  • Orders: Jumped from 2.83M (2024, 2 days) to 5.63M (2025, 4 days), a +99% increase.

  • Amazon extended Prime Day to 4 days, spreading out shopper urgency.

  • Average Order Value (AOV): Dropped from $64.87 (2024) to $41.94 (2025), a -35% decline.

  • Shoppers bought more but spent less per cart, signaling lower intent.

📈 ROAS Stayed Solid

  • Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Slightly down from 11.7x (2024) to 11.1x (2025).

  • Despite the AOV dip, ad efficiency remained strong, supporting profitability.

💸 Discounts Took a Backseat

  • Total Discounts: Slashed from $11.26M (2024) to $5.15M (2025), a -54% drop.

  • Brands prioritized margins over deep discounts.

  • Shipping Discounts: Surged from $546K (2024) to $1.51M (2025), a +176% increase.

  • Free shipping and Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) strategies replaced heavy discounts.

🤫  OPEN AI QUIETLY INTEGRATES SHOPIFY INTO CHATGPT

OpenAI has discreetly added Shopify as a shopping search partner, enhancing ChatGPT’s product search features.

Shopify now joins Bing in providing data for ChatGPT’s rich shopping results, including product images, prices, descriptions, and review summaries.

Merchants from Shopify and Amazon, as well as other platforms like Turbify (formerly Yahoo Stores), are already appearing in these results.

Stores not hosted on Shopify can still apply to be included by ensuring they're not blocking OpenAI’s web crawler (OAI-SearchBot). This integration was quietly updated in OpenAI’s documentation in May 2025, shortly after the announcement of ChatGPT's enhanced shopping capabilities.

This move underscores OpenAI's broader ambition to become a significant player in the e-commerce discovery space, providing sellers with a new channel for customer acquisition beyond traditional marketplaces.

The 5 Amazon PPC Campaigns That Took Us to $1M/Month:

^ This Amazon brand makes $1 million every month ^

What does the Amazon PPC look like on a $1m/mo Amazon account?

Find out in this campaign-by-campaign video breakdown of one of Chris Rawlings’s portfolio brands over at Sophie Society.

You’ll get an insider look at each of the top 5 best performing campaigns on the account, plus a step by step guide on how to set them up yourself.

Click here to peek behind the scenes on a $1m/mo brand. 

 🔗 BDSN MYSTERY LINK of the DAY 🔗

🌟  AMAZON’S STARFISH AI CATALOGS WORLD’S PRODUCTS

Amazon's ambitious Starfish project is harnessing AI to revolutionize product listings, aiming to become the world's top source of comprehensive product information

Initially expected to add an impressive $7.5 billion in extra sales in 2025, Starfish uses generative AI to streamline and enhance product listings by automatically filling missing data, correcting errors, rewriting titles, bullet points, and descriptions.

This initiative, launched in stages since 2023, significantly reduces the time sellers spend creating product listings, improving listing quality and conversion rates.

Starfish not only boosts Amazon's marketplace sales but also positions Amazon to potentially rival Google Shopping by collecting extensive product information from external websites.

  • Starfish AI generates accurate, complete, and compelling product listings.

  • Amazon expects the initiative to drive $7.5 billion in additional sales next year.

  • The project simplifies listing processes, benefiting third-party sellers.

  • Starfish sources product details from 200,000 external brand websites.

  • Amazon is currently testing Starfish’s effectiveness through internal A/B testing.

By proactively adapting to this AI-driven transformation, sellers can leverage Starfish to maximize visibility and boost sales on Amazon’s platform.

🥃 PARTING SHOT

“The two most important days in your life are the day you’re born and the day you discover why.”

Mark Twain

✌🏼 Have a great weekend.

See you again on Monday.

The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
576 shipping containers were lost at sea in 2024