Latest / Selling on Giants: The eCommerce Marketplace Podcast / Amazon AI Shopping, B2B Growth, Retail Media, and the New Rules of Product Discovery

Transcript

Amazon AI Shopping, B2B Growth, Retail Media, and the New Rules of Product Discovery · Selling on Giants: The eCommerce Marketplace Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Selling on Giants.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is the show where we break down what is actually happening across Amazon, Walmart, retail media, and e-commerce.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: And more importantly, what it means when you are responsible for the PL and every decision eventually shows up in performance.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: This week the stories look separate on the surface, but the pattern is very clear once you connect them.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Amazon is moving deeper into B2B procurement, compliance is tightening again, retail media is becoming more intelligent, AI is turning into the shopping layer, and retailers are fighting to own more of the customer journey before the shopper ever reaches a product page.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: That is the real theme today.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Commerce is not just moving online anymore.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Commerce is becoming more structured, more measured, more automated, and more controlled by the platforms that own the infrastructure.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with Amazon business, because this is one of those updates that can look boring if you are only thinking about consumer sales, but it matters a lot if you sell in categories where procurement behavior matters.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Amazon is encouraging sellers to upload certifications to reach B2B buyers, and the numbers behind this are worth paying attention to.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Amazon business buyers spent over$450 million in 2025 with sellers displaying certifications, and first-time certified sellers saw an average of 10% B2B growth in 2024.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: That tells you something important.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Amazon business is not just a side channel for office managers buying printer paper.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: It is becoming a procurement platform where buyers filter vendors based on compliance, diversity requirements, quality standards, and purchasing rules.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: That means visibility is not only about price, reviews, and advertising anymore.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: In some B2B categories, visibility is also about whether your business meets the procurement requirements the buyer is already searching for.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: For sellers in industrial, medical, office supply, commercial equipment, janitorial, food service, and other institutional categories, this creates a different type of advantage.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: If your business qualifies as minority-owned, woman-owned, veteran-owned, ISO certified, or holds relevant federal and quality certifications, those are not just badges for a profile.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: They are potential filters that help you show up when procurement teams are narrowing suppliers.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: The operator takeaway is simple.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: If your business qualifies for certifications and you sell into a category with B2B demand, upload them.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Do not leave that advantage sitting offline while Amazon is building more of the purchasing workflow inside Amazon business.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is not going to replace pricing, availability, and operational performance, but it can create a meaningful edge in categories where institutional buyers need to justify who they buy from.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's move from procurement to compliance because Amazon is also expanding enforcement around lithium batteries and battery-powered products.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: This affects more sellers than people realize because batteries show up across electronics, toys, fitness products, home devices, beauty devices, accessories, rechargeable household products, and plenty of products that brands do not immediately think of as battery categories.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Amazon is expanding requirements around listing attributes, testing, inspection, certification verification, and documentation.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Affected ASINs will receive notifications through account health, but waiting for that notification is not a strategy.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: A product can be perfectly safe and still get suppressed if the listing attributes are incomplete, the battery classification is wrong, or the documentation is not ready when Amazon asks for it.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is where a lot of sellers get frustrated, and I get it.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: The biggest issue is not always the requirement itself, it is the ambiguity around enforcement.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Sellers are already reporting different answers from support, uncertainty around non-rechargeable lithium button cells, confusion around integrated versus replaceable batteries, and unclear guidance on which fields actually trigger suppression.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: That is the part operators need to understand.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Compliance risk on Amazon is increasingly moving upstream.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Amazon does not want to discover problems after the fact.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: They want sellers to prove compliance before the product maintains visibility and fulfillment access.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: That means your compliance process cannot live in a folder someone checks once a year.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: It has to be part of catalog management.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: If you sell anything battery powered, audit the catalog now.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Check attributes, battery type, certifications, testing documents, inspection records, and whether the details inside Seller Central match the real product.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Do this before a suppression notice, because once the listing is down, you are operating from a weaker position and every hour becomes revenue loss.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's shift into advertising because Amazon is quietly making Prime Video more performance oriented.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Prime video ads can now change based on what a viewer has already seen, which means brands can run sequential creative instead of showing the same message over and over again.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds like a media buying detail, but it is actually much bigger than that.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Traditional TV advertising was broad and repetitive.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: You introduced the brand, hope people remembered it, and maybe saw lift later.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Sequential prime video ads move closer to a full funnel structure where one message introduces the product, another reinforces the value proposition, and a later message pushes urgency, offer, or conversion.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: The reason this matters is that Amazon owns the layers.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: They have streaming inventory, shopping behavior, search intent, retail media data, and purchase history.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: When those pieces connect, the advertising system gets much more interesting.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: The creative strategy becomes less about one great ad and more about the order of messages across the customer journey.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: For brands, that means you need to start thinking in sequences.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: What does the first touch point need to communicate?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: What objection does the second message need to address?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: What offer or proof point should come later?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: The more retail media matures, the more creative strategy starts to look like customer journey design, not just asset production.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: That connects directly to another Amazon update, which is the expansion of household level insights inside Amazon Marketing Cloud.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: AMC is giving advertisers more ability to analyze how households engage, purchase, and respond to advertising across Amazon's ecosystem.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: That is a meaningful step because it moves the conversation beyond campaign metrics and into behavior.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of only asking what keyword converted or what campaign drove the sale, more sophisticated advertisers can start asking how households buy, how repeat behavior develops, what cross-category signals matter, and where lifetime value is actually forming.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: That changes media allocation because you are not optimizing only for immediate ROAS.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: You are trying to understand customer value over time.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: This is where retail media is going.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: It is not just advertising anymore, it is customer intelligence infrastructure.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: The brands that understand this will start making better decisions around creative audience segmentation, remarketing, and budget allocation.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: The brands that only look at surface level campaign reports will miss the deeper pattern.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And this brings us to the bigger AI layer because Amazon also launched Join the Chat, an AI-powered shopping feature that creates product summaries and answers shopper questions directly inside the shopping experience.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is a major shift in how product pages function because listings are no longer only being read by humans.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: They are being interpreted by AI and then explained back to the shopper.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: That changes the job of the product page.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Your bullets, attributes, images, reviews, and product details become source material for the AI layer.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: If your content is confusing, incomplete, repetitive, or inconsistent, the AI may summarize your product poorly or fail to surface the strongest reason to buy.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: The PDP is no longer just the presentation layer.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is the data layer feeding the customer's shopping assistant.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is why structured content matters more now.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Clear bullets matter, accurate attributes matter, consistent positioning matters, reviews that reinforce your key benefit matter.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: The customer may not read every word you write, but Amazon's AI can interpret the entire listing and shape what the shopper understands.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Google is moving in the same direction, but from search, Google is adding more links into AI overviews, which is a response to the concern that AI answers were summarizing content without sending meaningful traffic back to publishers and brands.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: More links inside AI overviews create more opportunities to earn visibility, but the nature of visibility is still changing.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Ranking alone is not enough anymore.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Being referenced inside the AI output matters.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: For e-commerce brands, that means informational content, category education, product comparisons, and structured answers become more valuable.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: If AI systems are deciding what to summarize and cite, then your content needs to be easy to interpret, authoritative, and directly useful.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: This ties into the broader AI paradox McKinsey is calling out across consumer industries.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Companies are spending more on AI, but the measurable impact is still limited in many cases.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: That should not surprise anyone who has actually implemented new tools inside an operating business.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Buying AI is easy.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Integrating it into workflows that improve decisions, speed, forecasting, inventory, conversion, or margin is much harder.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Most companies are still using AI at the surface level.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: They speed up content production, automate small tasks, or reduce friction in narrow workflows, but they are not always improving the business model.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: That is the gap.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: If everyone has access to the same tools, the advantage shifts back to execution, data quality, workflow design, and strategic clarity.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is where I want to pause for a second because this is exactly how we think about growth at Bellivix.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of brands do not need more tools first.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: They need clearer operating systems.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: They need to understand where the constraint is forming, whether that is compliance, conversion, fulfillment, advertising efficiency, content structure, or channel dependency.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Bellivix has helped brands generate over$500 million on Amazon.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And what we see over and over again is that performance improves when teams stop chasing every shiny object and start aligning around the highest leverage work.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: AI can help, retail media can help, and new marketplace tools can help, but they only create value when they are tied to a clear operating plan.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: If your team is trying to scale across Amazon, Walmart, or marketplaces and the complexity is starting to outrun the structure underneath it, you can learn more at bellivix.com.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's move to consumer behavior, because not every category is feeling the market the same way.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Apparel spending is softening as consumers pull back on discretionary purchases.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Apparel is often an early warning signal because shoppers can delay, substitute, or skip those purchases more easily than essentials.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: That matters because brands carrying too much inventory into softer demand can get squeezed quickly.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Conversion drops, promotions increase, average order value gets pressured, and suddenly the inventory assumptions that made sense a few months ago do not look as clean.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you are in apparel or another discretionary category, this is the time to watch hero skews, replenishment assumptions, and promotional strategy very closely.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, commerce is moving deeper into media environments.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sports Illustrated Swimsuit is launching shoppable content, which is another example of the line between media, entertainment, and commerce disappearing.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Consumers are not only discovering products through search, they are discovering them through content, creators, editorial, social, video, and lifestyle moments.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: That changes the path to purchase.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: The product page is not always the starting point anymore.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the first real moment of demand happens inside a piece of content and the listing only exists to close the sale.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: That means creative, storytelling, landing page alignment, and social proof all become more important.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: If you are only optimizing for marketplace search, you are missing part of the journey.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Walmart understands this, and their beauty strategy is a good example.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Walmart is expanding and modernizing beauty with better assortment, premium and trend-driven brands, stronger in-store presentation, and more digital discovery.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Beauty is a strategic battleground because it has repeat purchase behavior, higher margin potential, social discovery, creator influence, and strong emotional positioning.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is Walmart trying to move beyond being seen as a value-on destination.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: They want to be taken seriously in categories where discovery, branding, and trust matter.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: For beauty brands, that means Walmart deserves a more serious look, but it also raises the bar.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Creative quality, premium positioning, reviews, and social validation matter if you want to win in that environment.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now look at GameStop.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because this story is less about video games and more about infrastructure.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: GameStop reportedly exploring interest tied to eBay is interesting because it signals what companies are starting to value.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Products are low margin.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Marketplace infrastructure has leverage.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: A marketplace brings transaction flow, seller ecosystems, advertising potential, payments, data, and recurring economics.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: That is the bigger lesson.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: The value in commerce is shifting towards systems, marketplaces, fulfillment networks, payment layers, advertising platforms, retail media, customer data, and operating infrastructure are becoming more valuable than simply selling products.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: Operators who control systems gain leverage.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Operators who only sell products compete on margin.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Shopify is moving in that same direction through a different path.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: The launch of ChatGPT and Cloud Connector apps for merchants turns AI assistance into operating interfaces for e-commerce.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of digging through dashboards, merchants can increasingly ask conversational tools about store performance, inventory trends, and tasks.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: That might sound like productivity, but it is bigger than productivity.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: The interface layer is changing.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: The operating system for commerce is becoming conversational, and that means clean data, organized workflows, and strong oversight become even more important.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: If your systems are messy, AI will only help you move faster through the mess.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Meta is pushing from the consumer side with AI agents tied to Instagram shopping.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Instagram already influences product awareness, trend formation, impulse buying, and creator-driven demand.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Adding AI assistance turns the feed into something closer to a storefront with a sales associate layered on top.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Consumers may ask questions, request recommendations, and move from discovery to purchase without ever starting at search.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: That is where commerce is heading.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Amazon is making the product page conversational, Google is making search AI assisted, Shopify is making operations conversational, Meta is making social shopping conversational, Walmart is making retail more experiential and data driven.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Amazon is making streaming more sequential and measurable.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: When you connect all of this, the pattern is hard to miss.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Commerce is becoming more mediated by AI, more measured through retail media, more dependent on structured data, and more controlled by the platforms that own the customer interface.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: That does not mean operators are powerless.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: It means the job changes.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: The advantage is not in reacting to every update.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: It is in building clearer systems, cleaner data, stronger content, better creative, tighter compliance, and a deeper understanding of where the customer is actually being influenced.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: The edge is not in hacks.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: It is in execution, clean data, clear systems, and fast decisions.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: If this episode helped you connect a few more dots, share it with someone on your team or another operator who is trying to make sense of the same shifts.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have not already, leave a review so more brands can find the show and stay ahead of what is actually changing.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Will here, signing off from selling on Giants.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Let's keep building.