🛑 The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Your supply chain is not immune

The strait is the world's most critical oil chokepoint and it’s closed since March 4 meaning oil is more expensive today.

For Amazon sellers, this is not abstract geopolitics. Higher oil means higher freight costs, pricier FBA inbound and fatter landed costs. Maersk, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd have all suspended transits through the strait and related routes.

If you source from Asia or the Gulf and have not stress-tested your margins at $100+ oil, now is the time. Price increases, slower replenishment cycles, and stock-outs are real risks in the coming weeks.

Brace yourselves because this war doesn't look like it's going to be fixed quickly.

📰 What you need to know

👉 Amazon rolls out paid 1-hour and 3-hour delivery in the U.S. Prime members pay $9.99 for 1-hour and $4.99 for 3-hour delivery; non-Prime customers pay $19.99 and $14.99 respectively.

Thsi means over 90,000 products are eligible for super fast fulfillment across pantry, health and beauty, electronics and toys. Standard same-day delivery stays free for qualifying Prime orders.

Speed is now a paid tier! Think about what categories benefit most and whether your FBA inventory is positioned in the right Same-Day sites.

👉 Amazon retail site outages were partly caused by AI agent bad advice. An Amazon's official blog post clarified that only one incident involved AI tools, that none of the incidents involved AI-written code and that the cause was an engineer following inaccurate advice that an agent inferred from an outdated internal wiki 😂😂😂

The string of incidents included a nearly six-hour crash that left customers unable to check out, see prices, or access their accounts.

Amazon spending $200B on AI capex this year while its own site goes down because of stale wiki data. What a time to be alive!

👉 Amazon is now the largest retailer in Europe and the UK, reaching a GMV of €179.7 billion last year, edging out Schwarz Group (Lidl's owner) by just €300 million.

👉 Walmart says ChatGPT's integrated checkout performed three times worse than having users click out to Walmart's website

👉 JD.com launched its Joybuy platform in the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, banking on fast deliveries and high-quality products to take on Amazon. Unlike Temu or AliExpress, JD owns its inventory and operates 60 local warehouses, offering same-day delivery on orders placed before 11 a.m.

💡 Weekly tip: SEO for Amazon and SEO for Rufus are not the same thing. Optimize for both.

Here is something most sellers miss: the products that rank top 1-3 organically in Amazon search results are often completely different from what Rufus recommends for the exact same keyword. Rufus is a history-based assistant. It does not just look at your keywords.

It looks at your reviews, your A+ content, your images, and even your video content to understand what your product actually does and for whom.

The fix: write your listing so that Rufus can answer a real customer question using your content. Think like the user, not like a keyword planner. If your product is great for a specific use case or audience but no one mentions it in your reviews or bullets, Rufus will ignore you entirely.

Extracted from my ebook Amazon SEO

⚒ Recommended software

As we do every week, here are two tools I reviewed this week.

AMVisor is the Amazon Vendor OS. It centralizes Vendor Central data, advertising metrics, stock management, and operational KPIs into a single customizable dashboard with advanced alerting.

M19 is an AI-powered Amazon PPC automation platform covering Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, DSP and AMC. Freemium tier available, scales up to full agency setups.