This is a post from inside the Billion Dollar Sellers Club (BDSC) from BDSS Dream 100 member Mansour Norouzi.

You can try BDFSC for just $9. There are 3 upcoming live (with replays) masterminds this month too with Kevin King, Ian Sales and more!

Plus, when you join, you GET A FREE GOLD TICKET to ECOM MASTERY in April!

Most people use AI like a search bar.

Type a question. Get an answer. Close the tab.

That's maybe 10% of what's possible right now.

I've been using Claude's Cowork feature. If you haven't tried it, it can access your local folders, create files, organize folders, run scripts. Basically act like an assistant sitting at your computer.

Cool. But not the game-changer.

The game-changer? Scheduling.

Cowork just added the ability to schedule tasks with skills attached.

That means you're not going to Claude anymore. Claude is coming to you.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

→ I connected my Amazon Seller API. Every Monday morning, Claude pulls last week's data and builds me a full briefing with sales, inventory, and ad performance. Not a basic dashboard. A dashboard + AI insights telling me what changed and why.

→ Don't have an API? No problem. I schedule my Amazon Search Term Report to auto-send to Gmail. Then Claude is scheduled to check Gmail, grab the report, and run my custom search term analysis skill on it.

I wake up. The report is done. The insights are already there.

Think about what this unlocks:

The data source can be anything: an API, a file in your folder, an attachment in your email.

The output can be anything : a weekly brief, a full STR dashboard, a PPC optimization report, a competitive analysis.

The trigger? Not you. A schedule.

This is the shift from "AI tool" to "AI operations layer."

And we're still early.

AI Search Engines Are Now Pulling From Customer Reviews to Make Product Recommendations. Smart Brands Are Taking Notice

ChatGPT users alone are making 84+ million shopping queries per week, according to Stackline. And the brands showing up in those AI-powered recommendations? They tend to have one thing in common: a deep well of customer reviews.

DTC brands across categories are getting aggressive about collecting reviews specifically because AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity are using them to decide which products to recommend.

Fireclay Tile's CEO says reviews are "one million percent" driving their AI visibility. Dog food brand Pawco is offering customers $20 off after their third order in exchange for a review, something they never would've done two years ago.

Timing matters. Pawco doesn't ask for reviews right away. They wait two weeks for one-time orders and three reorder cycles for subscriptions, so customers actually have results to talk about.

Where reviews live matters. AI engines are increasingly pulling from public forums like Reddit, Yelp, and Google, not just on-site reviews. Brands are now pushing customers to leave reviews in multiple places to increase their odds of getting surfaced.

Amazon is playing defense. While OpenAI struck a deal with Reddit to feed user posts into ChatGPT, Amazon has quietly blocked OpenAI bots from crawling Amazon content, including reviews. That's a big deal for sellers relying on Amazon reviews as their primary trust signal.

For Amazon sellers, your reviews strategy can no longer be Amazon-only. If AI shopping assistants can't access your Amazon reviews, you need reviews living in other places the LLMs can reach like your website, Reddit threads, Google Business, niche forums, and anywhere else these models are crawling.

The brands winning in AI-powered discovery are the ones treating reviews as a multi-platform asset, not just a listing metric on Amazon.

Amazon just made it easier for outside merchants to get their products in front of Amazon shoppers through Shop Direct, its AI-powered feature that surfaces non-Amazon inventory in search results.

The big news: merchants can now sync their catalogs through third-party feed providers like Feedonomics, Salsify, and CEDCommerce instead of relying on Amazon's crawlers to pull product data. A self-service merchant portal is coming soon too.

The numbers are getting real. Shop Direct now includes over 100 million products from 400,000+ merchants, with tens of millions eligible for Buy for Me, where Amazon's AI agent completes the purchase on the merchant's site using the customer's stored payment and address info.

Why this matters for Amazon sellers:

The bigger strategic play here is what one analyst is calling "Ultra-Hybrid mode." Amazon VP of Core Shopping Amanda Doerr confirmed she sees a world where brands split inventory across 1P, 3P, AND Shop Direct depending on the product.

Here's an example of how this could work. Say you sell premium kitchen knives. Your bestselling 8-inch chef's knife is in 1P because Amazon wants to price it aggressively and move volume. Your full line of specialty knives, sharpeners, and cutting boards you sell through 3P so you control the listings and margins.

But you also have a custom engraving service and a limited-edition collaboration knife that's a DTC exclusive on your Shopify store. Before, those products were invisible to Amazon's 300+ million shoppers.

Now you send that inventory through a Shop Direct feed, and when someone searches "custom engraved chef knife" on Amazon, your product shows up. They can click through to your site or let Amazon's AI buy it for them.

The result is 100% of your catalog visible to Amazon's audience without taking on additional FBA costs or restrictions for those exclusive items.

Amazon isn't doing this out of generosity. They're plugging selection gaps before ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity get their agentic shopping acts together. When asked about monetization, Doerr said they're focused on having "knowledge of all of the World's selection" first. Translation: lock in the catalog coverage now, figure out the toll booth later.

For 3P sellers, watch this closely. More outside inventory showing up in search results means more competition for eyeballs. But if you have a DTC site with products you don't currently sell on Amazon, Shop Direct could be a low-friction way to get that inventory discovered.

Holiday 2026 is going to be the real test of whether this reshapes how shoppers find and buy products.

Scot Wingo, a longtime e-commerce analyst and BDSS 13 Virtual speaker, lays out a sharp contrast between how the two retail giants are approaching the agentic AI shopping wave, and it helps explain why Amazon just opened Shop Direct to feeds.

Walmart's play: Open for business. Walmart has thrown open the doors to AI crawlers and agentic commerce protocols, welcoming outside AI shopping agents to come grab their inventory and bring in new customers.

The bet is that shoppers coming through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI answer engines are incremental customers Walmart wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Maybe even Amazon's customers. And Walmart's 3P merchants come along for the ride, getting extra exposure and sales with zero effort on their part.

Amazon's play: The doors are closed. Amazon views its inventory and product data as the keys to the kingdom. They've locked down access from outside AI agents and crawlers.

But as Wingo points out, this creates a problem. If ChatGPT and other agentic engines can pull inventory from every brand and retailer EXCEPT Amazon, over time their selection will actually exceed what Amazon offers. That's an existential threat for a company built on "everything store" positioning.

Shop Direct is Amazon's answer to this gap. If Amazon can combine all of their existing 1P and 3P inventory PLUS pull in the same outside merchant catalogs that ChatGPT has access to (minus Walmart, probably), then they can't be out-selectioned.

They keep their walled garden intact while still matching or beating the AI shopping engines on product coverage.

Two completely different strategies. Walmart is saying "come and get it" to the AI agents. Amazon is saying "nobody gets our data, but we'll go get everyone else's." By holiday 2027 we’ll know which bet pays off.

✌🏼 See you again Thursday …

The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
About 15% is Spanish speaking on the US Amazon site