🛑 Attention Amazon Sellers

Amazon just showed its final form.

New seller registrations hit a decade low in 2025, while GMV, traffic per seller, and million-dollar accounts all hit record highs. Translation: fewer players, more money, and zero tolerance for amateurs.

Amazon added just 165,000 new sellers in 2025, down 44% YoY and the lowest number since tracking began in 2015.

I started seeing this trend right before Trump won the election, and the biggest hit was with tariffs. Amazon is no longer seen as a place for quick bucks.

On the other side, same story, the Vendor purge and what I believe will happen in 1P: only big or strategic brands for Amazon will remain. Same push on 3P.

This is no longer a side-hustle playground. It’s infrastructure for well-capitalized, execution-first operators. If you can’t handle fees, ads, AI, tariffs and complexity at the same time, Amazon will chew you up and spit you out. Or your competitors will.

Rookies not welcome anymore.

📰 What you need to know

👉 I’m super thrilled to be a speaker at Worldef Dubai 2026 Honored to join an incredible lineup of Amazon and eCommerce heavyweights. Big conversations ahead.

👉 Amazon CEO Andy Jassy emphasized (in Davos 2026) that Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, is central to the company’s vision for Agentic Commerce, as it brings the conversational, question-driven discovery of physical retail into online shopping.

He highlighted that Rufus has become increasingly effective because it understands customer preferences and purchase history advantages that most third-party or generalized AI agents lack today due to limited context and unreliable product or pricing data.

Translation for sellers: we're going to see Rufus everywhere.

👉 Ecommerce traffic isn’t shrinking, it’s moving to… apps! App sessions grew +13% YoY, while traditional site visits stalled. Marketplaces are the only category still growing globally, with Amazon leading at 1.3B web users and 652M app users monthly.

👉 Are you familiar with Helium 10 Cerebro? Well, it got an upgrade and now Cerebro + Magnet are united on a single tool meaning you can keyword research and reverse ASIN any product and keyword in 15 Amazon markets + Walmart US

👉 Amazon is fighting Saks Global in bankruptcy court, claiming its $475M equity stake has been wiped out after mismanagement and cash burn. This could turn into a long, messy Chapter 11 battle and adds more cracks to Amazon’s luxury ambitions.

👉 Bee is Amazon’s experimental AI companion that records, segments and summarizes conversations on demand. It’s not always listening, but it raises big questions around privacy, consent and whether consumers actually want AI memory devices in daily life. Would you buy one? Yup, me neither.

💡 Weekly tip: Advanced PPC tip: use auto campaigns as semantic radar, not sales drivers

Most sellers either overspend on auto or shut it down too early. The real power of auto campaigns is semantic discovery, not volume.

Set it up like this:

1. Create 4 separate auto campaigns, one per targeting type:

   • Close match

   • Loose match

   • Substitutes

   • Complements

2. Run low bids (below manual CPCs) and Dynamic bidding: reduce only.

3. Review search terms every 5–7 days.

4. Promote only terms that:

   • Convert and

   • Reveal a new angle (use case, audience, problem).

5. Move winners to manual exact or phrase, then negative exact them in auto.

Why this works:

• You see how Amazon interprets your product, not how you think it should.

• You uncover intent-based keywords you’ll never find in keyword tools.

• You avoid auto cannibalizing your manual scaling campaigns.

Think of auto as Amazon’s brain dump. You listen, extract signal, then shut the noise down.

Extracted from my ebook
Amazon Advertising Hacks 

⚒ Software & services

As we do every week, here are 2 3 tools that actually move the needle:

• Jarvio is DA TOOL. Connects your Seller Central / Vendor Central, team, and apps (Slack, ClickUp, Google Sheets, Notion, Jungle Scout, Shopify, Zapier, and more) so you can run prebuilt or custom workflows that monitor your account, fix issues, and automate repetitive tasks.

• MarginPro: profit-recovery and cost-optimization suite for ecommerce brands on Amazon, Walmart and Target

• Hector is a next-gen Amazon AdTech platform unifying Sponsored Ads, self-serve DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)