You lost them at the end

FROM OUR SPONSOR:

Revenue ≠ Profit - and that’s where many Amazon sellers slip.

You can scale to 6 or 7 figures in sales and still bleed cash if you’re not tracking your true profitability. Hidden fees, refunds, rising COGS, ad overspend, storage costs… it adds up. Fast.

That’s why accurate profit analytics are non-negotiable.

You need to know exactly:

• What you're earning after every fee
  
  

• Which SKUs are dragging down your margins
  
  

• Where your ads help (or hurt)
  
  

• How refunds and returns affect your bottom line
  
  

That’s where Sellerboard comes in.

It’s the most detailed profit tracking tool for Amazon sellers - real-time, SKU-level, and accurate.

If you want to run a sustainable business (not just a high-revenue one), start below.

Everything Works Until the Part Where You Get Paid

Let’s begin with a simple, deeply disturbing truth: modern online shopping works right up until the exact moment you ask it to do its one job.

Because right now businesses are celebrating traffic. Traffic is up! Visitors are up! Charts are going up in a very satisfying direction that makes executives feel like they personally invented the internet. And yet - somehow - sales are behaving like a Wi-Fi signal in a basement: technically there, wildly unstable and disappearing the second you need it.

Because here’s the part they don’t put in the celebratory Slack messages: most people who click “add to cart” are not buying anything. They’re abandoning it. Leaving it behind. Walking away from your checkout like it just asked them to fax over a signed permission slip.  And not just a few people. Most people. Seventy percent of carts are abandoned. Seventy. Percent. That is not a funnel. That is a mass evacuation. A number so large it starts to feel less like a statistic and more like a collective decision. Like society has quietly agreed: “Yes, we will browse. We will consider. But we will not, under any circumstances, deal with whatever this is.”

And what is “this”?

Well, it’s the checkout experience. A magical journey where a simple purchase transforms into a psychological endurance test. You begin by clicking “Buy Now” which is a lie. Because you are not buying now. You are buying later. After you’ve completed a series of tasks that would make a government office blush. First you must create an account. Of course you must. Because nothing says “quick purchase” like committing to a lifelong relationship with a website you found seven minutes ago while looking for a slightly nicer desk lamp.

Then it’s passwords. Not just any password. A strong password. One uppercase letter, one number, one symbol, one ancient rune and - if possible - the blood of a small goat.

Then comes shipping. Billing. Confirm billing is the same as shipping. Confirm you are, in fact, a human being. Confirm you still want the thing you wanted three emotional phases ago.

And somewhere around step twelve, something in your brain just quietly goes, “You know what? I don’t need this. I don’t need anything. I will simply become a monk.”

And off you go.

Now, here’s the truly deranged part: even rich people are doing this. People with money. People who like spending money. People who woke up thinking: “Today, I will make a series of questionable financial decisions.” And even they are hitting checkout and going - “No, actually, this is humiliating.” Which means we’ve achieved something remarkable: we’ve made giving us money feel like a burden. That is the business equivalent of opening a lemonade stand and then interrogating every child who approaches it like they’re applying for a mortgage.

And instead of fixing that - instead of fixing that - companies have decided the solution is… more traffic.

More traffic!

Yes, of course. If your bucket is leaking the obvious move is to pour water into it faster. That’s just science. That’s basic hydrodynamics. Isaac Newton absolutely said: “If problem, add more.”

It’s madness.

You are paying more and more to bring people in only to watch them bounce off your checkout like it’s an emotional support wall. You’re essentially funding a very expensive parade where no one is allowed to reach the finish line. And the tragedy is the people leaving aren’t confused. They’re not stupid. They’re not even particularly annoyed. They’re just… done.

Because friction doesn’t feel like friction anymore. It feels like disrespect.

Every extra field, every unnecessary step, every “please create an account to continue your journey into buying socks” - it’s a tiny signal that says : “We do not value your time nearly as much as we value our data collection.” And eventually people respond in the only reasonable way: by closing the tab with the quiet dignity of someone exiting a very bad party.

So yes, traffic looks great. Fantastic even. A roaring success if you ignore the small detail that almost none of it turns into money. Which means the real bottleneck isn’t getting people in the door. It’s what happens when they try to leave with something in their hands - and you’ve somehow turned that into the hardest part of the entire experience.

And honestly, at that point, it’s not a conversion problem.

It’s a maze designed by someone who hates both you and the concept of commerce.

Which is fixable - just not with more traffic, more ads or more optimism.

It’s fixable by removing the nonsense.

So if you want the practical version - the actual steps to stop people from abandoning carts halfway through an identity crisis - it’s all laid out in The “They Were Literally About to Pay” disaster recovery plan.

Amazon Sellers Are Wasting Money With This PPC Campaign Mistake

Amazon PPC advice is a bit like diet advice on the internet: there is a lot of it, it’s delivered with absolute confidence and at least half of it will quietly ruin your life if followed too literally. One of the most popular ideas floating around is beautifully simple: use exact match campaigns, keep budgets small, stay “controlled” and everything will work out. Which sounds responsible. Sensible, even. Like packing a light jacket in case it gets chilly.

Unfortunately, in practice, it can also be the PPC equivalent of bringing that light jacket into a hurricane and saying: “Well, I’ve done my part.” Because Amazon’s ad system doesn’t reward caution nearly as much as people think it does. And strategies that look clean and efficient on paper can end up slowing growth, limiting data, and turning your campaigns into very underperforming suggestions.

In this episode we take a closer look at this widely shared PPC approach - what actually makes sense, what doesn’t and where sellers are unintentionally holding themselves back. We’ll break down why relying too heavily on exact match can restrict discovery, how small budgets can starve campaigns of the data they need to work and what a more effective launch strategy actually looks like if your goal is growth - not just feeling in control.

Because when it comes to Amazon PPC the biggest mistake isn’t spending too much.

It’s spending carefully in all the wrong places.

Tune in above and check.

Headline Sold Separately

Agentic Commerce Is Here, and It’s Already Asking You to Leave the Store

OpenAI decided it was going to reinvent online shopping, which is a bold move considering online shopping is already so efficient it occasionally feels like you’ve accidentally summoned an object through sheer desire. You think “I could use a lamp” and two days later a man appears, hands you a box and vanishes before you can process what just happened. That system works. It’s eerie but it works.

And OpenAI looked at that and thought: “Yes, but what if we made it… conversational?” Because the dream was enormous. Not just “search,” not just “recommendations.” No - this was agentic shopping. You wouldn’t browse anymore. Browsing is for peasants. You would simply tell the AI what you want and it would handle everything. Like a digital butler. A very powerful, very intelligent butler who, crucially, has never actually bought anything in its life.

And for a brief, shining moment it looked like this might be real. Huge partnerships, big retailers, millions of potential products. It sounded less like a feature and more like the opening move in a quiet coup against the entire concept of websites. Tabs? Gone. Carts? Gone. Your ability to comparison-shop at 1:30 a.m. while eating shredded cheese out of the bag? Also gone. And then, immediately, it became clear: this thing had the retail instincts of a goldfish.

Because shopping, it turns out, is not just “knowing things exist.” It requires details. Timelines. Availability. Prices that correspond to reality. ChatGPT approached these concepts the way a fortune teller approaches your future: suggestively, creatively and with no legal obligation to be correct. You’d ask for a backpack and it would recommend something that absolutely existed… at some point… possibly in a warehouse that has since been converted into luxury flats. Prices felt like they’d been generated by a dartboard labeled “numbers that seem polite.” It wasn’t shopping. It was improv.

And then there was the selection which was meant to be vast, infinite, a shimmering digital marketplace. Instead it often felt like opening a wardrobe expecting Narnia and finding a single flip-flop and a note that says “we’re working on it.” Millions of merchants were theoretically involved. In practice it was more like six guys named Dan with artisanal candle side hustles.

But all of that - every weird recommendation, every ghost product - could have been forgiven. Because in retail there is one sacred moment. The final step. The holy ritual where a human gives you money in exchange for goods. That is the one thing you absolutely cannot mess up. That’s like a parachute company forgetting to include the parachute.

And yet - magnificently - they messed it up.

People got to checkout and just… didn’t check out. Not dramatically. Not angrily. Just quietly disengaged, like guests at a party who suddenly realize they’ve been talking to a coat rack. Sales didn’t dip - they evaporated. The entire system developed the commercial energy of someone saying, “Oh no, please, after you” until everyone leaves.

Retailers noticed. Of course they did. Because when you run a business you tend to notice when a new partner arrives and immediately starts turning completed purchases into philosophical questions. At a certain point, they collectively decided - “This has been fascinating but we do enjoy revenue” and began backing away like people exiting a room where someone has brought out a guitar unprompted.

And so now, we arrive at the pivot. The glorious, inevitable pivot. The feature didn’t fail - it evolved. It’s not “bad at selling things,” it’s “focused on discovery.” Which is an extraordinary rebrand. That’s like a pilot announcing, “Good news - we’re no longer attempting to land. We’ve decided to specialize in flying near airports.” ChatGPT is no longer the cashier. It is now a very articulate friend who points at shops and says: “You might like that one” before immediately leaving the building. It has been demoted from “handles the transaction” to “gestures vaguely in the direction of commerce.”

And honestly that might be the correct role. Because if your revolutionary system panics at the exact moment money is introduced you haven’t built the future - you’ve built a tour guide with stage fright. Now, to be fair, the idea isn’t absurd. One day an AI might genuinely handle shopping end-to-end. It might compare options, optimize prices, maybe even gently intervene when you try to buy something described as “minimalist” that is, in fact, just worse. That future could exist. But right now we are very much in the phase where the AI stands in the middle of the experience, confidently recommending things it half-understands, gesturing toward a checkout it refuses to touch and somehow acting surprised that commerce involves… finishing the transaction.

Which means, for now, the cutting edge of shopping technology remains exactly what it has always been: you, a browser and an increasingly fragile belief that the product with 4.7 stars and a review titled “Changed My Life (Not Sponsored)” is not, in fact, going to arrive smelling faintly of regret.

You’re Selling Products. They’re Buying Moments.

Let me start with something slightly uncomfortable. If your entire marketing strategy still revolves around “getting people to your website” you might be optimizing for a world that’s quietly disappearing. I’ve had conversations with brand teams who proudly say: “We drove 40% more traffic this quarter.” And my first thought - though I don’t always say it out loud - is: cool… but did anyone actually care?

Read the whole story...

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