STUMP BEZOS
The CEO of Cloudflare has announced that bots have passed human traffic for the first time in the internet's history. What percent of web traffic is bots?
[ Answer at bottom of email ]
👀 TIKTOK SHOP’S HIDDEN KEYWORD FIELD PRINTING SALES
Credit to Alina from AZ Rank, who ran this test and published it in her Ranking Pill Newsletter. She wil alsol be one of the experts at BDSS Market Masters 4 this August 20-24 in Austin (flying in all the way from Romania!)
The setup: TikTok Shop has a Search Keywords field. 250 characters, comma-separated, sitting in the listing editor. Almost nobody fills it in.
The hypothesis: keywords that already convert on Amazon should work on TikTok Shop too, because purchase intent doesn't change between platforms.
The test: One product. One listing. Three keywords pulled straight from Amazon data (SQP, Product Opportunity Explorer, existing intent research). No guessing what TikTok shoppers might type. Everything else in the shop left untouched as a control.
What happened:
Product level vs. prior period:
+79% GMV
+102% impressions
+75% items sold
Product Card channel:
$1,584.98 in Card GMV
111 orders
+92.95% GMV growth
Search funnel:
82,577 impressions → 1,631 clicks → 111 orders
6.81% click-to-order rate
The three keywords that got purchases out-ranked the two control keywords that didn't. The flywheel is the same one Amazon sellers already know: keywords feed the algorithm, card shows up more, shoppers buy, rank climbs, repeat.
Do this week (if you sell on both):
Open Brand Analytics → Search Query Performance for your top ASINs
Pull keywords with high click share + high conversion share
Cross-reference niche signals in Product Opportunity Explorer
Build a list of 15 to 20 keywords that fit your product on both platforms
TikTok Seller Center → product listing → Search Keywords field
Paste comma-separated, 250 char max
Save. Wait 30 days. Watch the card metrics.
Amazon-only right now? Pocket this. The day you launch on TikTok Shop, the playbook is already built.
2026 PRIME DAY CHECKLIST
Prime Day is next week. 👀
Here's the part most sellers miss: the brands that win it didn't start prepping this week. They started 6 to 10 weeks ago. Keyword testing, ad tuning, inventory math, all locked in before the surge hits.
That's the gap. It's also why the rankings you earn during Prime Day can stick for weeks after, but only if you set it up right.
A few numbers worth sitting with. Prime Day 2025 drove $24.1 billion in sales. 307 million items moved. 63% of US households ordered two or more times. And 2026 is expected to top all of it.
Done wrong, Prime Day is a short spike that fades by the weekend.
Done right, it lifts your organic rankings, brings in new buyers, and builds momentum that outlasts the event.
BDSS Dream 100 member Destaney Wishon teamed up with Carrie Miller of Helium 10 to put together a practical checklist that walks through everything you should be reviewing before the big day:
Inventory planning. Listing optimization. Advertising strategy. External traffic. Historical trend analysis. Post-Prime Day momentum.
It pulls tactics from the most trusted voices in Amazon, and there's a personal worksheet included so you can run your own plan against it.
It's free. Grab it before next week.
[ Download the Prime Day Checklist ]
🔭 YOU GOTTA SEE THIS
What happens when you try to grow your e-commerce startup too fast, take the wrong venture capital, and lose everything in a hostile takeover?
In this episode of Marketing Misfits, hosts Norm Farrar and Kevin King chat with Chris Rawlings, the brilliant mind behind Sophie Society. Chris shares his wild, unconventional journey from growing up in an experimental, off-grid solar house in the forest, to playing in a touring ska band called The Waffle Stompers.
After a stage injury led him to invent and sell spinal health products on Amazon, Chris found massive early success helping other sellers rank in the German market. But it wasn't all smooth sailing.
Chris opens up about the dark side of Silicon Valley, detailing how he social-engineered his way into the elite 500 Startups accelerator, only to lose his first company, Judo Launch, to a predatory family office investor.
Today, he runs Sophie Society with a revolutionary, performance-based culture where every team member acts as their own CEO.
If you are an entrepreneur looking to scale, hire A-players, or just need to hear an incredible comeback story, this episode is a must-watch!
🌎 INTERESTING STATS
🦾 THE AI SHOPPER JUST GOT MORE VALUABLE
Two things happened this week that should change how you think about where your next sale comes from.
First, the data.
Adobe Analytics ran the numbers on AI-referred shoppers in May. The people who land on a retail site after asking ChatGPT, Gemini, or another large language model for a recommendation are not tire kickers. They are buyers.
Here is what Adobe found, reported by Reuters on June 15:
AI-referred shoppers generated 53% more revenue per visit than non-AI traffic.
They converted at a rate 54% higher.
They spent 53% more time on the site and viewed more pages.
AI traffic to retail sites jumped 138% year over year. That is the highest share of total retail visits since Adobe started tracking in October 2024.
This is not junk traffic. The AI sends you a shopper who already did the research, already narrowed the field, and shows up ready to spend. Other Adobe data this week points to agentic shopping cutting returns by as much as 69%. Fewer returns on higher-converting traffic. That math fixes a P&L.
Here is the catch. Most of this traffic is flowing to brand-owned websites. Not to Amazon
When a shopper asks an AI for the best magnesium glycinate or the best cast iron skillet, the model sends them to the brand's own site to close. If your entire business lives inside Amazon, you are watching the highest-converting traffic on the internet land on the doorstep of sellers who built a presence outside the box.
That is the first shoe. Here is the second.
Claude now has product cards
This week, monitoring agents at ReFiBuy caught Anthropic's Claude serving product cards for the first time. Electronics, pet, fashion, beauty. Across categories, not in one test corner.
They are rough right now. Clearly a first version. But the direction is not subtle. Analyst Scot Wingo moved Claude up his Agentic Commerce autonomy tracker from "Research" to "Find," and moved Perplexity down, because Perplexity just yanked its product cards and buy button out entirely.
So one major AI is backing away from shopping while another just walked in the front door.
Anthropic has been meeting with merchants since at least the NRF show in January, and Claude has said out loud it wants to act on a shopper's behalf to handle a purchase.
New retail features tend to ship in summer and ramp into the holidays. Wingo's open question is whether Claude goes from Research, to Find, to Buy in time for Holiday 2026. Plan as if the answer is yes.
What this means for you
You now have a third surface deciding whether your product gets recommended. And you do not control it the way you control your Amazon listing.
The old game was ranking in Amazon search. The new game runs in parallel. It is whether an AI model knows your product exists, trusts it, and serves it up when a shopper asks.
Call it AEO or GEO. The models pull from structured product data, third-party reviews, editorial coverage, and authoritative content. If you are invisible to the crawler, you are invisible in the answer. Period.\
What to act on now:
Get off Amazon-only. Stand up a clean, fast, machine-readable brand site. The AI traffic converts higher and it needs somewhere to send people. Right now that somewhere is rarely an Amazon detail page.
Make your product data readable. Clear specs, structured data, straight answers to the questions buyers actually ask. The AI cannot recommend what it cannot parse.
Build authority off your own site. Reviews, comparison content, and mentions on the sites the models already trust. That is the ticket into the recommendation set.
Watch the cards. Run shopping prompts in Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini for your category every week. Track whether you show up and how you get described. If a competitor appears and you do not, you found your homework.
The shoppers coming through AI are worth more, and they are growing fast. The platforms are racing to own the checkout. Sellers who treat this like the early days of Amazon search, and move before it is obvious, will own the next few years.
The ones who wait for it to be obvious will be buying ads to win back customers an algorithm already handed to someone else.
🛠️ BDSN SOFTWARE TOOL of the DAY 🛠️
The PPC Stack Most Amazon Brands Are Missing
Everyone wants to scale Amazon PPC Adnam Aslam says.
Almost nobody has the plumbing to do it.
He says most brands are still duct-taping disconnected tools together and calling it a strategy. Messy workflows. Data that lives in five places. Bids managed on vibes.
He says here's the pattern that separates the winners.
Top sellers don't hunt for one magic PPC tool. They build a stack. Every tool has one job inside the growth engine.
1. Research
Winning campaigns are won before a single ad goes live.
Helium 10 for keyword research and listing insights. Jungle Scout for product and niche validation. Data Dive for keyword clustering and ranking analysis.
Better inputs mean less wasted spend later. Garbage in, garbage spend.
2. Campaign Management
This is where the scaling happens.
Amazon Ads for core campaign management. Perpetua for automation and bid optimization. Pacvue for advanced retail media.
Launching campaigns is easy. Controlling bids, budgets, and profit at scale is the whole game.
3. Optimization
Most brands launch ads. Few actually optimize them.
Teikametrics for profit-focused automation. Quartile for AI-driven scaling. Ad Badger for search term and bid work.
Tiny improvements compound. A few points of ACOS across thousands of keywords adds up fast.
4. Analytics
You can't scale what you can't see.
Amazon Marketing Cloud for customer journey data. Amazon Marketing Stream for real-time campaign signals. Amazon Attribution for external traffic.
The best operators decide from data. Everyone else guesses and hopes.
5. Conversion
Traffic without conversion is just expensive visibility.
PickFu to validate creatives and listings. Manage Your Experiments to A/B test. Canva for visuals that earn the click.
Lift your conversion rate and every PPC dollar works harder automatically.
Here's the shift.
Most sellers think PPC is about ads. It's about building a connected system for research, bidding, optimization, analytics, and conversion that all talks to each other.
The smartest brands don't run campaigns. They engineer profitable ecosystems.
🥗 PEOPLE PREFER PRODUCTS with FEWER INGREDIENTS
According to Science Says, framing your product as having "just a few" ingredients instead of "many" can make shoppers up to 22% more likely to pick it.
Say you just launched an organic electrolyte drink mix. Clean, tastes great, only 4 ingredients.
Problem is, everybody on Amazon now claims "organic" and "all natural." Those words stopped meaning anything.
Here's the edge. Tell people your product has "few ingredients." That alone moves the needle.
And spell out what makes your brand sustainable (e.g. "ingredients sourced local and organic"). Shoppers read sustainable as higher quality.
Recommendation
If your product has few ingredients, say so. Put it in your title, your bullets, your A+ content, and on the package itself.
Skip it if your product is bought for pleasure (a cookie, a candy) or for nutrition (vitamins, supplements).
Do it right and more shoppers hit buy.
People prefer and buy food and drink products described as having "few ingredients" over ones described as having more. Same exact ingredient list. Just different framing.
Across 19 experiments, when products were described as having fewer ingredients:
Shoppers chose an identical granola bar 21.6% more often
They were 16.4% more likely to buy a juice
They were 66.8% more likely to say they'd buy a peanut butter
Meta ads pulled up to 44.2% more clicks
The effect flips when people want pleasure (a rich dark chocolate bar), uniqueness, or a range of vitamins. It runs stronger with shoppers who care about natural ingredients.
Why it works
More ingredients reads as more processed and less healthy.
Fewer ingredients reads as natural.
We lean toward those because they feel safer and healthier.
The exception is pleasure or novelty. Then more ingredients signals more flavor.
Real-life example
LesserEvil sells high-quality, healthy snacks.
❌ The miss: their Himalayan pink salt popcorn has only 3 ingredients, but they say it nowhere on the listing or the bag.
✅ The fix:
Put "Only 3 ingredients" in bold on the package and the main image. Write it as a digit, "3," not "three." Digits sell.
Add a sustainability line (e.g. "Sourced sustainably, 100% recycled packaging"). That can lift enjoyment up to 23%.
Use images that signal taste and freshness (a slice of lemon, a chili pepper).
🔥 MORE HOT PICKS 🔥
🥃 PARTING SHOT
“The purpose of business is not to make money…The only reason to start a business is to deliver some product or service to humanity that makes their life better.”
✌🏼 Have a great weekend.
See you again on Monday.
The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
57.4% of internet traffic is bots
