Kevin King’s BDSS Market Masters 4 happened last week in Austin to rave reviews as “the best event in e-commerce.” Those who have been, you know. ( replays here )

September kicks off tomorrow, and there a lot of e-com events happening. Below is a guide to those interested in hitting up one or two of them.

Three events Kevin is going to:

Funnel Hacking Live 2026 — "Encore: The A.I. Era" — is Russell Brunson's ClickFunnels event, September 21–23 at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, drawing 2,000+ direct-response marketers for three days on AI-built funnels, offer creation, and scaling with a skeleton team (tickets $997–$1,297).

For e-com sellers, this is the room where offers and traffic get engineered rather than optimized. It’s the exact muscle Amazon never made you build, and the one that decides whether your off-Amazon store, TikTok Shop funnel, or email list actually converts when the marketplace isn't sending you the buyer.

UNBOUND is HubSpot's rebranded INBOUND — September 16–18 in Boston, 200+ sessions on AI-driven go-to-market, with Tom Brady, Mel Robbins, Cynthia Erivo and Aziz Ansari on the marquee. It's already sold out, and the rename is the tell: HubSpot just retired the word "inbound," the term it coined and built a $2B company on, because AI search is dismantling the content-and-keywords engine that made it work.

For e-com sellers, that's the whole reason to care. This is the largest room of marketers publicly rebuilding their playbook for a world where AI answers the question instead of sending traffic to your page, the same shift hitting your Amazon listings via Rufus and your Shopify traffic via ChatGPT.

AI Mafia is a referral-only, 40-seat retreat in a private Tampa villa on September 28–29, hosted by Rich Schefren, Dennis Yu, DC Fawcett, Reed Floren, Andy Jorgensen and Matt Radicelli. No stages, no pitch decks, no badges, Jjust operators who've already built AI into their businesses swapping what's actually working behind closed doors.

For e-com sellers, the value isn't the AI talk you can get free on YouTube; it's the room. Forty vetted founders sharing unfiltered case studies is where you find out which AI workflows are producing real margin.

Coming Thursday the low down on September’s other big ecom events: Alibaba CoCreate, Top Dog Summit, Commerce Roundtable, Amazon Accelerate and Amazon Unboxed, plus a guide to all the parties in Seattle during Accelerate.

If your business address is in Texas, you have been paying a tax since October that most sellers still don't know exists. And there's a meeting in Austin this Wednesday where the state wants to hear from sellers about it.

What happened. The Texas Comptroller rewrote Rule 3.330, the rule defining "data processing services." The new language says that when a marketplace stores your listings and photos, keeps your transaction records, and compiles your analytics, that is data processing. Data processing is a taxable service in Texas.

So your marketplace fees became taxable. The provision took effect October 1, 2025. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Poshmark are all charging it.

The math. Texas sales tax is 6.25% state plus local, up to 8.25%. State law exempts 20% of the value of data processing services, so 80% of your fee gets taxed. Call it 6.6% on top of every fee you already pay.

On $1M in sales at a 15% referral fee, that's $150,000 in fees and roughly $9,900 a year in new tax. At $5M, about $49,500. Nobody sent you a bill. It just started showing up inside your fee invoices.

Why they call it a double tax. Take a $100 sale with a $15 commission. Texas taxes the $100 retail sale. Texas now also taxes the $15 commission. The state collects on $115 of activity from a $100 sale. The law firm fighting the rule calls it "a tax on 115% of marketplace sales."

And here's the part that should make Texas sellers angry. The charge follows the seller's own address, not the buyer's. eBay applies it by your registered address. Etsy said "sellers located in Texas." Poshmark used the Texas return address. So if you're in Dallas and your competitor is in Denver, you both sell the same product to the same Houston buyer through the same marketplace, and only you pay tax on your fees.

Texas just made it more expensive to be a Texas seller.

The rule stands on shakier ground than it looks:

Nobody is coming to fix this. The Legislature adjourned without acting. The October 1 start date was specifically delayed to give lawmakers a window, and they didn't use it. The next regular session is 2027. No lawsuit challenging the marketplace provision has been filed. Which means the only near-term lever is the Comptroller's office itself, because the Comptroller wrote this rule and the Comptroller can rewrite it.

Which makes the timing interesting. Don Huffines was sworn in as Texas Comptroller on August 1 and he's on the November ballot against Sarah Eckhardt.

What to do this week if you are in Texas (and other states):

📣 Texas sellers — advocacy opportunity, this Wednesday.
The Connected Commerce Council is bringing sellers to Austin to meet with the Texas Comptroller's office, and they'll cover flight and hotel for anyone traveling in.

A brand-new comptroller, an election in November, and a rule his own office can change. If you sell out of Texas, this is the rare case where showing up in a room actually matters. Contact Kristin Rae, Seller Policy Expert, at connectedcouncil.org.

Check your inbox. If you already run Multi-Channel Fulfillment, Amazon may have dropped early access to MCF with Prime in your account.

What it does: the Prime badge and Prime delivery speed on your own site, through your own checkout. Your customer never signs into Amazon. They never leave your store. They just see the one thing that makes a stranger trust a website they've never bought from before.

This is not Buy with Prime. That's the distinction most sellers are going to miss. Buy with Prime is a separate button and a separate flow. The shopper logs into their Amazon account, and Amazon sits between you and your customer. MCF with Prime is badge-only. No checkout changes. You keep the cart, the customer data, and the relationship. US only for now.

The price. Amazon says Prime delivery on MCF SKUs costs nothing extra for your first 12 months. Reports put ongoing pricing at the same rate as standard 3-day MCF, meaning the badge without the expedited surcharge. If you're already paying MCF rates, this is free money for a year.

Does the badge actually move anything? JLab turned on Amazon delivery badges and reported a 55% lift in site conversion in the first month, a 37% higher AOV on Prime orders versus standard DTC, and average delivery around 1.5 days against a 5-day category average. Amazon's older company-wide number for Buy with Prime was a 25% average conversion lift. Take vendor stats with the usual salt, but the direction is not ambiguous.

Here's the math that actually decides it. MCF runs 30–50% above FBA and often above what a good 3PL charges you, especially over 3 pounds. A small standard single unit is $7.34 non-peak. Large standard, 1–2 lbs: $10.64. Peak rates hit October 15.

So if your 3PL does that same order for $5.50 and your contribution margin is $20, you need roughly a 15% conversion lift just to break even on the switch. JLab cleared that bar four times over. A thin-margin, heavy product may not clear it at all. Run your own numbers before you move a pallet.

Three things to watch:

The badge was Amazon's single biggest moat over your own website. Amazon just rented it to you. For twelve months, at least, it's cheap.

Remember all those tariffs the Supreme Court struck down earlier this year? The refunds are real, they're rolling out in waves, and a growing number of companies aren't waiting around to collect. They're selling their refund claims to Wall Street for cash today.

Academy Sports & Outdoors sold a chunk of its claims for $10.5 million. GoPro offloaded $19.4 million in claims as part of a credit deal. The Children's Place sold $38.2 million of expected refunds at 67 cents on the dollar and pocketed $25.7 million upfront.

The timing mattered a lot. Companies that sold before the Supreme Court ruling took brutal haircuts of around 20 cents on the dollar, because buyers had to price in the risk that the tariffs would survive. After the ruling, those same claims jumped to 80 to 90 cents. Some sellers who held out are now collecting nine-figure government payouts in full.

So why would anyone still sell? Because the payout process is slow and phased. The first wave covers recent imports, and most of those are getting paid. But if your claims involve older imports or low-cost goods that used to come in duty-free under de minimis, nobody knows when, or if, your money arrives. One deal broker says inquiries from impatient companies are up 50%+ since June, representing billions in claims.

What this means for you:

✌🏼 See you again Thursday …

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