A new listing has one problem bigger than rank. It has one review and the listing next to it has 1,200. No amount of copy fixes that. Price does, for a while, and the trick is discounting hard without teaching Amazon that your product is cheap.

This came out of a BDSC panel with Mike McClary of Amazing.com, Bradley Sutton of Helium 10, and Isabella Ritz of Ritz Momentum.

Three ways to run launch pricing, and they stack.

Why the heavy discount works

The panel's rule for a launch: 30 to 50% off until the reviews catch up. The psychology is simple. "$50 list, now $25" makes a shopper think "at that price I have to try it." That's the trust barrier being bought down. Once the reviews exist, the discount shrinks.

The mistake is doing it by lowering your list price. Then there's no strike-through, no anchor, and when you try to raise it later the conversion falls off a cliff.

Mike's conversion bomb

Three pricing elements on the page at once: a strike-through from list price, a coupon badge visible in search results and on the page, and a promotion on top. Shoppers read that as three separate wins.

The sequence matters because Amazon gates two of them.

Promotions you can run on day one. Start there.

Coupons need sales history first, so you can't lead with them.

Strike-through needs a real list price with sales behind it. Get five to ten sales at full list price. Then add a Prime-exclusive discount: Prime members see the lower price with the strike-through, non-Prime shoppers pay full price, and the full-price sales keep the strike-through alive.

Once you're eligible, add the coupon. Now all three are stacked.

Bradley's version

Bradley gets the strike-through faster. On day one, have three or four buyers purchase at full list price through a direct link. Two rules: no search-find-buy, and tell them plainly not to leave reviews. It triggers the strike-through about half the time. When it doesn't, put the product back at full list price for a day or two every few weeks and try again.

His other launch habit: run an FBM offer alongside FBA at the same price. Around 10% of shoppers don't have Prime, and they abandon the cart when shipping appears. The FBM offer catches them, and the occasional full-price FBM sale helps keep the strike-through valid too.

Isabella's pay-to-play ladder

Isabella would rather let the market set the price than guess. List the product in the catalog at your target price, say $69.99, so you never lose the buy box. Then actually launch at $59.99.

Every two to four weeks, raise it a dollar: $60.99, $61.99, $62.99. Watch sales velocity at each step. When you hit the price where sales fall off (say $65.99), settle a dollar or two under it.

Two more from her. Enroll in Vine the moment inventory lands; her success rate is high when the product is good. And launch at a reasonable price, because Vine reviewers see the price and it colors the review.

The guardrails before you discount anything

The panel's margin floor, so the discount doesn't bankrupt you: sell at 3 to 3.5x landed cost minimum, 4 to 5x target. Isabella won't touch anything under $49 retail; the sweet spot is $79 and up with an $18 to $22 landed cost.

Leave a 30% net margin after everything, because PPC, reorders, and price wars all come out of that. And higher-priced products often carry lower CPCs, since fewer sellers can afford to compete in the $100 aisle than the $20 one.

Run it in order: promotion on day one, five to ten full-price sales, Prime-exclusive discount, coupon. Then start walking the price up a dollar at a time.

The full panel covered product selection, expansion, and the pre-launch play that builds demand before inventory arrives. It's all in the Billion Dollar Sellers Club replay library, with plenty more like it. Try it for $9 at billiondollarsellers.club.

On TikTok Shop, the winners aren’t stores. They’re media operations with a checkout button.

The numbers:

Output beats audience and catalog.
Top 1% sellers post 14x more videos than everyone else but list fewer than 3x the products. One in five hit the top 1% with under 10,000 followers. And fewer than 1% of top sellers have posted zero videos.

The mindset shift:
On Amazon, your store is a warehouse with a search bar. On TikTok Shop, your store is a content channel.

But video won’t save the wrong product.
Two-thirds of top sellers move things people wear, apply or consume. Content multiplies demand for a product that already grabs attention in 15 seconds. It doesn’t create it.

And the moat resets constantly.
Nearly half of this month’s top 100 sellers weren’t in the all-time top 100. Stop posting and someone else takes your spot.

The takeaway: If you’re on TikTok Shop, your real job is publishing. Pick a product that demos well, then outpost everyone.

Source: TikTok Shop Trends Report 2026

Helium 10 just dropped a free YouTube series on using AI inside an Amazon business. Bradley Sutton, Carrie Miller, Leo Sgovio and Jo Lambadjieva run it.

Here’s what the first three lessons cover.

Lesson 1: Why the AI gap keeps growing
Sellers using AI daily finish listing rewrites, PPC reviews and review research in minutes. Everyone else takes days.

Lesson 2: Which AI tool for which job
Same seller tasks, four tools, head to head:

Claude won and runs the rest of the bootcamp. Start on Pro. Move to Max when usage justifies it.

Lesson 3: Stop AI from making things up
AI sounds confident even when it’s wrong. That gets expensive on search volumes and listing attributes.

The difference isn’t the tool. It’s knowing how to feed it good data and ask the right way.

✌🏼 Here’s to your success …

The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
Sales were up by a factor of 1.78 over Prime Big Deal Days.