606: Kevin King On The Future Of Ecommerce: Amazon vs DTC In 2025

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Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I am joined by Kevin King, a veteran Amazon entrepreneur, mentor and educator you probably already know about from the Freedom Ticket course and his two podcasts. Kevin also runs the Billion Dollar Seller Summit and a popular newsletter where he shares insider strategies with some of the top minds in e-commerce. Now today, we’re diving into where Amazon is headed.

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the future of D2C and what these shifts mean for anyone selling online. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most e-commerce conferences that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches.

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people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. There are no corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We have sold out every single year for the past nine years, and I expect this year to be no different. It is happening April 21st to the 23rd in Fort Lauderdale,

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And if you’re doing over 250k or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for higher level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever going to be. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. That’s sellersummit.com. Now on to the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Coder Job podcast. Today I am thrilled to have Kevin King on the show. Now Kevin is someone who I met a long, long time ago, but we didn’t actually really have a conversation until we both got booted off the live stream to tens of thousands of viewers at the Alibaba Co-Create Conference. Kevin is a veteran entrepreneur, mentor, and educator. And if you sell on Amazon, you’ve probably seen his face from his Freedom Ticket course.

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which I believe is still given out for free by Helium 10 if you have a subscription. He’s the co-host of two podcasts, the Marketing Misfits podcast and the AMPM podcast where he shares insider strategies. And he also runs a conference called the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. And finally, he runs this amazing Amazon newsletter, which I recommend that everyone subscribes to. Now, today I invited Kevin on the show to talk e-commerce.

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and where he sees things going with Amazon and D2C. with that, welcome to the show, Kevin. Hey, I’m glad to be here, Steve. It’s nice to nice to see you again. So I actually didn’t really want to mention Alibaba. I was debating myself whether I should mention Alibaba because you know, they’re so sensitive about that sort of thing. But uh it really was the first time that we got a chance to connect, right? Yeah, it was. It was, you know, that was kind of weird. They I was in the

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taxi on the way to that show in the morning. think we were on the stage that afternoon and the organizer lady is coordinating us. She and says, Hey, Kevin, I want to switch this around. had Tim kind of hosting your panel. This is the three of us, me, you and Tim. And she said, want you, I’m afraid he might say something. So I’m going to have you uh host the panel. That’s okay. I’m like, well, I guess you don’t know me because I might say something too. But, uh okay. I didn’t say that to her. I swear I’m thinking.

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So I was like, yeah, sure. So we get up there and beforehand they come to us and they said, hey, you can’t talk about solar panels. You can’t talk about there’s, there’s a few things you had to be careful about it because this has been live streamed back to I think it was millions of people. I was like, okay, I didn’t know that it a lot. Yeah. And so we go up on stage and we’re doing our bit and talking about the Alibaba and Amazon and sourcing and all kinds of stuff. And then about, think, I think we had

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25 or 30 minutes total and there’s a little countdown timer. And so as I’m asking you and Tim questions and going back and forth, I’m looking at the counter and I saw at one point it was like 16 minutes left. And then I asked a question of one of you two and then I looked over and it was almost, it was at three minutes. I was like, man, in my head I was like, did I just black out? I think I asked you guys that at the end when we got out, was like, did you all see that timer jump down or what happened? That blackout or something on stage?

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And are like, no, we weren’t paying attention. And then we get off and then we go down and we’re like, what? Someone comes up to us and says, hey, we had to cut the feed because y’all said something you’re not supposed to say. We’re like, well, what we say? And we couldn’t figure it out. And we thought maybe it’s because we said YouTube and YouTube is banned in China. But it turns out that ah a few, about a week later, the lady calls and said, don’t worry about it. You guys were voted the most popular panel at the event, ah despite this. And it was because… m

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you weren’t talking enough about Alibaba, you were talking about Amazon stuff and other things. like, okay. um Tim got invited back the next year, so they weren’t too mad. Oh, okay. Well, uh did I get invited back? I don’t remember. Probably not. Anyways, okay, so what did I want to talk to you about? So first of all, uh you got a lot of things on your plate.

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I’ve always been curious, like what are you actively working on right now? Are you still actually selling on Amazon uh products that you actually directly manage in addition to everything else? Yeah, we I do have a seasonal business on Amazon. I mean, when I first started selling on Amazon 10 years ago, I had five different product lines and multiple skews on each of those. Five different brands, one in pets, one in fitness, one in beauty, um one in electronics and one in kitchen. um And

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I launched all five of those and ended up narrowing that down to a couple. But since, don’t know, 1995 or something? I know, that’s not… I’ve been producing wall calendars, seasonal wall calendars. And we had a DTC list on that that we did a lot of direct mail and we still do direct mail. For those of you young ones listening, direct mail means you send something with a stamp to the mail and it goes in a mailbox. No one knows what that is, It’s a physical mailbox. Yeah.

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And then people send checks and money orders. Those are little pieces of paper that say pay to the pay to the order of. A money order you can get at 7-Eleven. You pay like 79 cents or something for the fee. uh Takes cash. Anyway, uh so I’ve been doing that for a long time. So I still do that with Amazon. uh And we wholesale into like calendars.com, which is the big kiosks in the malls as you see pop up during the holidays and a few other places.

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That keeps my hand in the Amazon business. So we have 10 different SKUs that we do there. ah So that way I’m still selling. I’m still familiar because I think you can’t teach if you’re not doing it. mean, you get out of dates really quickly. know, things change rapidly and they’re changing even more rapidly now. So the law that was a long answer to say, yes, I still sell still sell. And then I mentioned the two podcasts and I know you’re launching something else.

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right now right? Yeah I have the two podcasts which you’ve been on the marketing misfits podcast is great to have you on that was an awesome episode that I do with Norm Farrar and then I do one for helium 10 called AMPM podcast which is that’s pretty much all Amazon focused and the marketing misfits is general marketing focused and then I have the newsletter like you mentioned billion dollar sellers that comes out twice a week I’ve been doing that been doing the

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Marketing Misfits podcast a year, the AMPM podcast about three. I took that over from the founder and I’ve been doing the newsletter for two. And then yeah, I have something else called BDSC about to come out that I’m not announcing. Oh, you’re not announcing? Okay. We don’t have to talk about that. can talk about that. I’m teasing it right now getting people to to figure out what does that C stand for? Because I have my events BDSS, billion dollar seller summit. Right.

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And then I have the newsletter BDSN billion dollar seller newsletter. So now I have a C and people like, is this club committee conference crypto? uh I don’t know. It’s something left. So I’m just hyping it. All right. This is what I wanted to talk to you about. So Amazon has directly and indirectly implemented a ton of fee hikes in just the past year and a half. And clearly, at least in my mind, the Amazon gold rush where anyone can do this successfully is is over.

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So my first question to you is, would you say are the prereqs today to start selling on Amazon? And what should people be mentally prepared for? If you’re new, I agree with you. The gold rush is over. You don’t see all the guys with their Ferraris nearly as much on social media trying to sell courses. Courses, because of AI, becoming, know, a lot of people have been making money off selling courses, and a lot of that’s going to go away because of AI.

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to get into today it’s a real business in ten years ago you could just pop on and find something on olivaba, oh a brand name on it that you made up and put it on there and go sit at the beach and listen to your phone ding all day and make a lot of money and get lots of reviews. Those days are long gone. Now it’s a real business. gotta wear a lot of hats. You gotta know logistics, sourcing, inventory management, uh finance, marketing. uh

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customer service, I mean the whole range, it’s become a big, it’s a real business now and so it’s, the people that want to get into it and they say, how much do I need to get into this? I used to have a rule that when I would tell people, you need two and a half times your initial landing cost. So if your life savings was 10,000 bucks, let’s say, and that’s what you had to invest in this, you needed to find a product that you could get landed for four grand maximum.

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and you not run out of stocks. There’s a lot of various math formulas you got to do and I show that kind of stuff in the Freedom Ticket. That way you have money to actually buy the next round before you get paid for the first round, you’ll be able to continue. But I think that number depends on your goals. If you’re in Pakistan and you’re making six or six hundred dollars a month is the decent wage or the average wage or some of the Latin American countries, if you could make a thousand or fifteen hundred on Amazon, you know, you could change your life in theory.

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And but for me and you, that’s a side hustle that’s not even going to pay much at all. So it depends on your goal. So if you’re from one of those countries and you just want to check, you could do that for less money. But if you’re like from the West, you’re going to have to put some serious money in and be prepared to put more money in because it’s a very cash intensive game. And what a lot of people sell is they sell this dream.

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And they sell that, yeah, buy it for 20 bucks, buy it for two bucks, sell it for 20, you got an $18 profit. And they leave out all the stuff in between. the margins are getting compressed, like you said, with the Amazon fees continuing to rise. And it’s squeezing the people who are not good operators and good at math, and it’s squeezing a lot of people. And a lot of people are, you know, we have the gold rush of the aggregators, a lot of those guys.

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that were around in 2014, 2015 that started selling Amazon, they cashed out for good multiples at the peak. And most of those guys, some of them retired, some of them tried to do it again, and most of them are failing because they don’t have the skill set. They were right place, right time. uh And the aggregator thing bombed as well. And so now it’s more about, for me, Amazon should be not, it’s a great place to launch and to prove something because the eyeballs are there.

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but it should not be your only focus. should be maybe your first focus if that’s the direction you want to go. But then you need to be a true brand. Trying to develop a true brand and not just looking for product opportunities. That was the old model is find a gap in the market, sell spatulas and sell radios and sell car chains and whatever else. Wherever there’s an opportunity. I think that’s much more difficult now you need to actually be building a true brand and in your master plan you need to get off Amazon.

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Amazon this needs to be the shopping cart of choice for some people, but you need to be DTC, you need to be Shopify, but that complicates it. Tick tock shop and Walmart and whatever. But that complicates it more because that’s a whole different skill set. There’s some overlap. But that’s what bogs a lot of people down. So I know you run an agency or you’ve helped a ton of sellers in the past. And I know for myself, people ask me, hey, I’m doing okay on Amazon, but I want to get off.

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Like what do you tell these people on how to proceed with the DTC shop like a Shopify store? Because sometimes products don’t even match, right? Yeah, I mean, I don’t have an agency. um when people want to do that, I usually tell them if they started on Amazon before you go to DTC, you might want to go set up a Shopify store just to have some credibility. But really, you should actually maximize Amazon first if that’s where you started. So go expand to Canada.

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And then consider expanding to maybe Europe, but that’s a whole other animal with, I mean, you understand the systems, but you got to have a whole other set of inventory and a whole other set of logistics uh that go with that and a few other things. If you’re going to go D to C, the difference between the two that most people understand is on Amazon, the traffic is there, you’re just maximizing the traffic. just like, how do I, you got, uh it’s like a freeway.

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of people driving by at 60 miles an hour with the window rolled down the credit card out. All you got to do is stand in the right spot and swipe as they go by. If you know how to do that, you can win on Amazon. On DDC, that’s a whole different thing. You got to drive the traffic. Either you got to have a list or you got to know how to run meta ads or TikTok shop or cold emails or whatever the flavor of choice is and drive that traffic there.

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There’s advantages to both ways. mean, DTC, you control the whole customer experience. With Shopify, you have all the plugins where you can modify it you can do a lot of cool stuff that you just can’t do. And you can do up sales and you can do retargeted abandoned carts and all kinds of stuff uh and control the look and feel a lot more and get the customer data. But you can’t do most of that on Amazon. there are two different animals. And I think a lot of people don’t understand that when they

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They go, I tried Shopify, it didn’t work. was like, well, what did you do? Well, I put up a site and sell much. Well, what did you do to drive traffic? Oh no, I sent a couple of emails. ah You know, that’s two different things. I think, you know, if you have the money and the capacity, if you know how to drive traffic or someone’s on your team to drive traffic, I think what I would do right now if I was just brand new and starting is I would start D2C if you know how to drive the traffic. Because then,

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have a pop-up or something and let Amazon be the overfill. Drive that traffic and then awareness yourself, either on TikTok shop with UTC creators or by whatever means you want by other kinds of ads. And then let them come to Shopify, let them experience it in the way that you want them to experience it. And you control the messaging, control the whole experience there. And if they still, if they don’t trust you, that’s okay. uh

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you have a pop-up or you even have an option, buy this on, you know, buy with Prime or buy this on Amazon, and go where they trust it and go over there. And that’s, think, how I would approach it. And I would approach it as like, let’s build a brand, not just a little store or a little thing. And like you, like what you do with the linens and stuff is I would be looking, if at all possible, trying to get into recurring sales of something where there’s the chance of a repeat order. It’s not just a one time. I’m going to buy a ladder.

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For the house and only need one ladder every 20 years. Yeah I mean I know you talk with a lot I mean you interview a heck of a lot of people every week and then you have the billion dollar seller summit What are some of the more popular strategies that either you’re implementing or that you’re seeing other people implement right now in the space? Probably the most popular silver shiny object right now is tick tock shop for a lot of people. Okay, and tick tock shop can be really good but

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It’s not as easy as a lot of people think and everybody thinks that they could just they want to hire an agency or hire UGC person and they’re go viral and there’s a lot more a lot more to it. But what I’m seeing right now and the whole e-commerce space in general is a mix where the savvy people are on top of three things and on top of marketplaces and that could be Shopify has a marketplace where they tie stuff together. mean so it could be marketplaces. It’s social commerce and AI.

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those three, if you can get your head around those three and how to intermingle those three modalities together, I think you have a really good chance of winning going forward. And I think that’s where people should be looking at uh right now. And if they’re going to sell ecommerce. Let’s peel back the onion here real quick on TikTok shop. Like, uh can you just give an example of what someone’s doing? What type of products work well?

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that you’ve heard or have experience with? Tick tock shop. mean, yeah, the electronic products can work well. Little gadgets and stuff can work well. And beauty products work exceptionally well. Some supplement stuff uh works really well. I know a woman, we’ve had her on the podcast. She’s doing 21 million dollars a year selling pants for women on Tick Tock Shop. OK, and I know someone else that’s uh doing artwork stuff and doing like six million.

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on tiktok shop and then you know you get the halo effect of some of that stills or amazon does not everybody buys on tiktok shop the thing about tiktok shop is is is i’ve bought stuff on tiktok shop and it’s brilliantly integrated so you just in there watching they know who to target they know based on your history based on other people and they they’ll just pop something in and you can scroll around live if you look at it’s really easy to add to cart uh… by it and a matter of

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five or ten seconds and then continue scrolling and there’s no interruption almost really in it. And so it’s impulse buys things. So you’re not going to sell a $10,000 thing on there. It’s going to be very difficult. But for top of funnel and for impulse buy, know, sub $100 items, those can do very, very well on there. Pet items can do very well as well. So there’s a handful of categories, but

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those will be the ones that I’m probably seeing people doing the best with.

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I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

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just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. What I like about TikTok Shop is I actually just recently started actually being a customer on there. The video continues to play actually while you’re all checking out. So it literally is really seamless. And that’s why I think it’s just doing really well.

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I mean, if you put it in perspective, though, I always like to tell people is people always like get their eyes real big when they hear TikTok shop. I’m going to go crush it there. It’s great. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s I think their total GMB last year, it depends on who there’s different reports that come out, but somewhere between 50 and 20 billion was their GMB, which is that’s not chump change. But that’s a weekend for Amazon. Yeah. Yes. During one of their sales, Amazon was 700 billion when you add the one P and three B to

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together, uh 1P and 3P not B, together. So it’s still extremely small. And I know they’ve been having some troubles. They gave away the farm, free shipping, and all kinds of promo discounts and everything for a while just to get people in. And now they’re tightening that up. And they just did a big layoff recently. They’ve just replaced a lot of executives from the US with Chinese-based executives. Because you guys are, you know,

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We’ve to actually make money now. We can’t keep bleeding money. There’s some changes going on and who knows what’s going to happen with Trump extending the ban and who knows what’s going to happen there. It may just be status quo or there may be an algorithm shift if someone buys it and that could affect things too. But social commerce is not going away. You know it’s funny, I actually just got on a meeting with Tmoo recently and you know because they’re struggling because of the Trump changes.

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and they’re trying to recruit sellers in the United States. uh First of all, do you know anyone who’s selling on Tmoo successfully? Just curious. uh One person I knew that they were selling sinks, like uh construction stuff. Interesting. Yeah, like big heavy duty sinks and stuff, but no, that’s the only one. And they’re doing a lot of drop shipping. And this was about a year ago. But other than that, no. uh

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That’s not a Chinese based seller. I’ve heard of nobody doing from the US, from the West doing well on, on Tmoo. Not to say that someone’s not, but Tmoo is having, yeah, they’ve lost, you know, they’re like the number one or number two app for a long time. That’s way down now. They’ve lost, what is your series? I’m like 60, 70 % of their sales because of the- lost 50 % of their traffic. The de minimis rule. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right after that. Yeah. So I was just curious. Shane’s having similar problems too.

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for some of the same reasons plus some other reasons. Yeah, so Tmoo is trying to attract sellers by saying that there’s no fees, but once you get into like the nitty gritty, you don’t even get to set your own price. They set the price. Yeah, no. I had a meeting with them in Seattle during, they did a little restaurant party pop up right next to the convention center when Amazon was doing their big event last year in Seattle called Accelerate.

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I went on and talked to him. The guy was exactly that. said, look, we get all these sellers. come over and this business development guy is like, we have no fees. I’m like, well, explain this to me. And he’s exactly what you said. Yeah, well, we set the price. We tell you we’re going to pay you this. And then we decide what we’re going to sell it for. was like, nobody’s going to come from Amazon because they’ll lose their buy box. Yes. As soon as you do that, they’re going to lose their buy boxes. I’m no, no, we have this and that. Dude, it’s not going to work. It’s simply not going to work.

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uh You’ll get a few naive people, but that’s about it. Or desperate people, I think they’re having trouble with that. Unless Amazon gets busted for all this. mean that’s like anti-competitive activity if I’ve ever, it’s like blatant, right? Yeah. Well Amazon does things until they’re forced to change. I mean, back seven, eight years ago, there was a big industry of buying stolen data from China, from people inside Amazon in China, so we could get

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you know uh… reports on what’s working on ppc for your competitors or what’s their backing keywords and all this people paying good money for this black market seven and amazon that threatened and i know we better start actually given people uh… so a little bit more dad so it doesn’t look like we’re just using this all for ourselves so they have the sqp now search for performance report may have uh… opportunity explore a lot more tools a lot more they’re much more loose with the data but they won’t make that change until it looks like they’re going to

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in trouble. The same thing happened with taxes. If you remember, weren’t collecting sales tax. And then they went after states were starting to go after sellers and then that got changed. this thing with the pricing, think it will eventually, it’s going to be a case that it’ll come down where that changes. But I know like right now, and what they do is buy with Prime. A lot of people don’t know this. If you have the buy with Prime on your site, um

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you won’t get penalized. if you on your Shopify site, if you have a buy with prime as an option and Amazon comes and and things are scrapes your Amazon or your Shopify site and sees that you’re selling it for $5 less than your own Amazon, they’re not supposed to actually penalize you on Amazon. That’s that’s straight from someone at the buy with prime team. That’s not something I read somewhere or in some form that’s straight from one of the top people on the team. She told me that it was in my newsletter a while back, but that’s

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the only workaround I know on that right now. Yeah. Well, mean, with BioThePrime, you’re giving them all your information anyway, so I guess throw you a bone, not penalize you. Yeah. Okay, let’s talk about AI because I mean, that’s the hottest topic, at least that I’ve been spending most of my energy on. What are some pretty cool ways that people are using AI for e-commerce that you know of? Well, a lot of people, here’s my take on AI and e-commerce is

26:03
You got a lot of people that have played with OATCHAT GPT or played with some AI stuff, but I think most sellers are just touching the surface. They’re barely doing anything. They’re having to rewrite an email or marketing email or they’re having to maybe analyze one of their PPC reports or something fairly basic or help them write to try to get a bad review taken off. That’s like fundamental kindergarten stuff for what AI can actually do. Most people don’t understand

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where this is how fast this is moving and where it’s going. And I think a lot of e-commerce sellers are going to be caught with their pants down. And I believe that there’s sellers on Amazon now doing five million a year, that two years from now are to be doing 500,000 a year and going, what the heck happened? Because people that are using AI are going to have such massive, uh AI correctly, they’re going have such massive competitive advantages. And if someone in their category starts doing that, they’re going to crush them. oh

27:01
And so AI and agent, agentic AI is I think where it’s at right now. And a lot of people that go, well, what’s agentic AI? Agentic AI is where you can have automate things. It’s an advanced form of automation where you have specialized. So here’s an example. So if I want to hire a PPC agency, I can go out and hire one of the top agencies in Amazon space. There’s about 800 of them that do PPC, literally about 800.

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have a list of them all. People always say, what’s the best PPC agency to use, Kevin? I was like, I don’t know. It depends on the person you get. This person at Clare Ads, if you get the right person, you’re going to rock and roll. But if you get employee number 27, they’re still learning. And they may mess up some stuff. So someone goes in, they get employee number 27, and they’re like, ah, Clare Ads just doesn’t work. This other guy offered it cheaper over here. I’m just going to bounce over here.

27:58
And what happens is people end up bouncing from agency to agency agency. What if you could take that number one guy, Clear Ads, that’s crushing it for his handful of clients, and basically duplicate him in an agent. Everything he knows, it into an agent, it’s only LLM, and have him then manage an account, but he’s getting data from other agents. So you have a series of agents. You have a PPC agent that’s basically a mirror of this stud PPC guy. You have another agent that’s a mirror of a sourcing person. Another agent is a mirror of an image creation.

28:27
listing creator another one is a good keyword researcher known to the trend and each one of those say specialize in the best of the best and they’ve been trained and coached up by uh… by real people to actually know what they’re doing and then they they take the a i the vast knowledge out there and then these things all talk to each other in a in a way right now they can’t really they can’t really think on their own completely think on their own but it’s going to get to the point where they can so they still needs to be a human in this loop

28:57
but you could take what maybe took twenty or thirty people or a month to do and now do it in hours with one human and a bunch of agents and by layering these agents together and having them talk to each other they can execute twenty four seven three hundred sixty five days a year that no one, no humans ever going to be able to do and can do complicated math and a lot of stuff that where if you overlay different components together you overlay the PPC and you overlay the

29:26
Some of these big data look at a company like pattern that has massive amounts of data points and lay all those data points you can really hone in on what you gotta do to a minute level to actually get that little extra CTR or to see what’s trending and I think it’s going to get to the point where if you see there’s good agents are monitoring tick-tock and they see that I don’t know baby at the time of this recording you know just a couple weeks ago these little baby photos of baby videos were very popular people are taking like me and you

29:56
Yeah. …putting baby faces on and doing little things. And they could see something like that as hot. the agent, there’s a video creation agent, uses maybe VO3 or one these other tools. It could come in and actually do that on the fly for me and you and actually have something out in hours to take advantage of that trend and ride that wave. um That kind of stuff is going to happen. You’re have stuff where they see someone’s, yeah, they’re all talking about some new cooking thing. ah

30:24
It’s going to see that and it’s going to be able to talk to the sourcing agent, the sourcing agent through MCP, which is a way that agents can talk to each other. There’s a couple of different modalities in this, it’s kind of a common language. It’s kind of like a translator where they can talk to each other. So you’re have a sourcing agent that’s going to talk to Alibaba and say, hey, we need to make a spatula or whatever. And which factories can do this with this kind of handle and this kind of thing because this is what people are complaining about, all behind the scenes without human.

30:54
And you have factories, it’s going come back and say, these three can do it. Oh, here’s a rendering of it. AI is making a rendering. And then the human looks at it and goes, yep, I like that. like that. Nope, let’s change this a little bit. Makes a couple prompt tweaks. And then you have it being manufactured almost instantly. And then you can do 3D printing. let’s test this spatula. OK, here’s the CAD stuff. Here’s all the STPs files. There’s everything. Let’s make 100 of them and test the market.

31:23
and we’ll have this out in a week or you order it and just give us, you you put a seven to 10 day delivery on there and then holy cow people love it. Now let’s go to mass market on it, mass production on it. So I think you guys see, start seeing more and more of those kinds of things happen. Yeah, I mean we’re not quite there yet. I’m just curious how are you using AI or some of the people that you know directly using AI at the current state it is right now?

31:51
Other you start to see like companies like triple well use this agent stuff. So what I just talked about is not science fiction five years from now. It’s happening now on a basic level by the most advanced people like triple well is a perfect example with their movie agents. um They’re doing this right now to not quite the example I gave but 70 % of that. But the average seller is using it um to help them create video content or ad content to help them come with avatars.

32:19
to help them come up with angles, uh positioning angles, know, and test different positioning angles. Those are the most common that I’m seeing now and then writing emails and customer service and trying to get rid of reviews. A lot of people have little chat bots where you can do that. um In the education space, um I see this is something that I’ll be, I’m doing, I’m doing at BDSC, we’ll…

32:49
I a hint of this, but where I see an education is, you know, if I go and I take the Freedom Ticket, if you take the Freedom Ticket course from me, that’s one course that was made for a mass audience. And maybe it’s not particular for you, but I think it’s going to get an education where I can take my content and maybe, and mix that with, it could be with you, it could be with somebody else or it could just be mine. And someone comes in and says, oh, I want to sell this. I have this much money, answers four or five, six questions.

33:18
and the course is automatically recreated on the fly based on my knowledge base specifically for that person and people don’t want to do a ten module course they want quick wins, want something fast so it’s like here the next three hours we’ll teach you everything you know to do specifically what you want based on that knowledge base I think you’re going to start seeing that type of stuff happening and I know a few people that are messing with that now I mean Jason Flatlin a lot of you may know the GOAT of webinars like

33:47
best webinar guy in the world. just finished a tool that writes webinars in his style, which is a really good style. And he says it’s actually writing better. He’s not putting it out just yet. He’s doing some beta testing with the beta testers. know I’m a mastermind that he runs. They’re like, holy cow. And even Jason himself says this is doing a better job than me writing and he’s the goat. So there’s uses like that. There’s a tool that I use.

34:16
called copy coders from Genesis. It’s a $10,000 tool. think he sells it sometimes for five. But this tool has got what he’s done is he’s created his own basically LLM. He’s gone and he’s taken all the greatest marketing minds and copywriters of all time, Ogilvy and all the guys back, you 100 years and dumped into this database and then taught it. And so that I can go in there and he’s got something called a prompt called click drivers. So I can go in there and I can just give it a link.

34:46
I can give a link to your website and it’ll go suck in all your website or I can give it an email that I’ve already written or I can give it just an outline of here’s kind of what I want to do. Hit a button and it instantly will write uh what’s called a click driver’s email with all the hooks, all the everything in it. It’ll give you 20 different versions in about five seconds of the email depending on which angles and which positioning statements you want to do and then you can mix and match them. The thing I started using it for some of my advertisers on

35:15
billion dollar solar summit, dollar solar newsletter and on my emails that I send out, it’s doubled and tripled my conversion rates. Interesting. Because it’s so freaking powerful. and some people are, yeah, Kevin, I don’t need some tool. I just use chat. It helps me do that. Yeah, chat. You can definitely help you if you know how to prompt it. But this guy’s prompt is 19000 words, 19000 words prompt. And it goes into PO to do it. And that’s powerful. And so that

35:45
I think that’s the thing is most people, it’s garbage in, garbage out. If you know how to prompt and you know how to write it, you can get amazing stuff. ah But I think you’re see more isolated cases where you can take your content, all your podcasts that you’ve done, all your trainings and everything that you’ve done, all your seller summits and put that into a custom LLM that people can query. It’s isolated. It’s just you. It’s not polluted.

36:15
by stuff that’s on the internet that may or may not be true because there’s people that are espousing ways to do things, know, teach course guides and YouTube videos and whatever that actually doesn’t work or it’s outdated or whatever. You can control that whole ecosystem and so I think you’re see a lot of that and that’s happening right now. I have something coming out two weeks that does that oh on my content. I tried to do that a year ago. I don’t think it was ready to go back then because it

36:43
It’s still kept kind of hallucinating stuff and extrapolating stuff that I didn’t say. Maybe it’s a lot better now. Maybe I should revisit that. Yeah, I would take a look at that. I have something launching in two weeks that has two versions. One’s a free version that has it scaled back a little bit. And the other one’s a complete custom LLM with all my content. Every podcast I’ve been on, every one I’ve ever hosted, all my newsletters, all my BDSS content, Freedom Ticket.

37:13
um for getting some, whatever webinar I’ve done. And you can go in there and you can, it’s not just a, it’s not a search engine where you just type in like, tell me what’s where Steve talked about PPC. Oh, it’s this episode, go listen to it. It’s not a directory like that. It’s like, what does Steve Chu think about blah, blah, blah? And if you’re in there, it’s gonna pull it from it. Or what are the top three people think about this?

37:42
and who are they, it’ll pull it all from there. You’re talking to it conversationally. Nice. That copy coders tool, is it like a one-time fee or? I think it’s an annual. I signed up for it in January, so I’m not 100 % sure on that, but it’s worth every freaking penny. Interesting. So the back end is probably one of the popular alums, right? He’s just composed a really Yeah, he’s using Claude.

38:09
Yeah, it was just Claude on the backside, but he’s got all these custom products. mean, another example is a VSL of a buddy that’s launching some stuff and he hired this company. It’s like 40 grand for this company to help him set everything up. And they have a VSL and they gave him the VSL to use to do some recruiting and stuff for people for the site. He’s like, this is not bad. So he threw it in chat, GPT gave it some prompts. He made it a little bit better because he kind of knows the audience a little bit better than the

38:38
company agency does and so he then he said Kevin can you throw this through copy coders I was like yeah sure so I threw it through copy coders and we did a series of variations on it and then he sent that to them so here use this one instead of what you guys wrote and the people you know the Filipino VA’s are like oh you sure you want to do that we are how is it like a buddy Mark’s like yeah no do it so they’re like okay and then about two hours later the owner of the company texts him and said where the heck did you get this

39:08
I said, I told you I know what I’m doing. I’ve got some access to some special stuff. He’s like, this is brilliant. You mind if we use this as a template ourself? And so that’s the power if you know, you got to know where to go and know how to look. And that’s the dabblers don’t know that. With Lovable right now, you can do some amazing stuff with N8n and make, you can do some really cool stuff. ah But a lot of people, they’re just playing and they’re not actually. ah

39:37
using it as a tool and the people that in e-commerce that understand how to use it as a tool to save money, to save time, and it’s not necessarily that I get rid of a bunch of people. I mean, that’s gonna happen by default. There are gonna be people losing their jobs, but those people hopefully can be retrained or they’ll just have to adapt into something else. But it should make the people that are on this, it should make you more productive.

40:02
Do you think there’s the future is a market of people who just create these prompts really well? Where do see the market going? I think we just had Jordan Hall on the marketing missets podcast a couple of weeks ago and he’s big time affiliate marketer, big in the space, done very well. And I asked him what’s going on here with AI and what’s your take? And he said he thinks there’s a two to three year window right here to make a lot of freaking money.

40:29
uh… as any commerce or education or and anybody that’s on the cutting edge of a i but that the rate a as changing some of that advantage is going to go away because it can be easier easier for the average joseph button and does everything right now it’s still mind-blowing to the average person uh… you know when you when you talk about this copy coders and i see it like holy cow it’s mind-blowing and they don’t have access to it but they they will down down the road a much cheaper price lead that

40:55
in any said as a what’s gonna happen all these people you know those always talk about people losing their jobs and all this is a you know in the future there’s gonna probably be a universal uh… income uh… because this is with robots and everything going on it’s gonna be difficult for lot of people to make a decent living or life might go up for people but he said the ones that are gonna make the money and i i just been thinking of this the day before he said it entrepreneurs entrepreneurs are sitting in the driver’s seat of this if you have a entrepreneur mindset

41:25
or entrepreneur abilities, you can see these potentials you can see this and you’re willing to take these risks. You’re willing to go out there and he said, and I believe this too, that the entrepreneur mindset type of person is going to thrive in this new AI economy and it’s going to put a distance between the worker bees and the entrepreneur types more of a distance. And so that’s why I tell everybody just start dabbling in AI just so you can understand the basics.

41:53
i mean i’m not a coder i’m not a developer i can’t despite understand the logic of it so because when i was in back in the eighties was no late yeah this is the early eighties when personal computers were just coming out my parents spent like four thousand dollars to buy this is the rocks here that the rocks the copy coming here uh… and said four thousand bucks and it was a little floppy drives you know it would do anything a little basic screen but one summer i taught myself how to do basic basic

42:24
And because of that, and I did some Pascal and a few things in college, but because of that, I understand the logic and the way of thinking. And that’s the problem that a lot of people have and the prompting is they don’t understand how to tell it what they want. And that’s why photographers and creative people right now are like, they’re not as worried. People are like, oh, you’re a photographer. Aren’t you going to be worried about your jobs? Like, no, this is the most powerful tool ever. Now I can tell it, I want this.

42:50
this f-stop and this lighting and this lens and this and this and it creates a beautiful right there if I don’t like it. Hit a couple buttons, does again. I don’t have to go spend $100,000 on a photo shoot and props and sets and deal with humans and all this. They’re the people that are going to win. So if you know how to do that and you understand the logic of how to talk to it, that’s the power. And that’s going to be the power for e-commerce people too is for whatever your goals are in e-commerce, knowing how to combine these things and how to talk to it to get the results that you want.

43:19
I was just having a conversation with a buddy the other day about the Shopify app store. Like I was going to give it two or three years until all those apps, which a lot of them don’t do much, people can just hit a couple buttons and generate something that’s very custom to their shop going forward. No, I think you’ll be able to do that. I mean, there’s some tools. What I just see that actually does that right now was it? ah There’s somebody already kind of doing something similar to that, or you just type in

43:49
And it basically creates, mean, the basic apps you can do right now with Lovable and some of these other vibe coding things. You when you start, you got to tie it in a database like SuperBase, or you got to start tying in NAD, and it starts getting a little bit more complicated. But I just talked to someone yesterday that’s using Lovable. And Lovable, for those that don’t know, is a vibe coding. It’s uh where you just go in and instead of having to type in all the coding, you know, the programming side of things, you just tell it what you want. I want to create an app that looks like a uh

44:18
Airbnb and does this and this and does these things but I want to change this and in seconds or under a minute it creates the entire thing and then gives you the code to take it to chat GBT to create like uh Graphics for the interface and all kinds of stuff, but she’s like, you know I come from the background of coding So I understand how to talk to it. So what she’s conversationally telling me what to do, but she understands what to say and once and

44:45
when does it does one thing say no it looks like you’re missing out whatever the comments here all you know you’re so right uh… let me add those for you real quick uh… you know so that’s that’s the best as a commerce as we know what works and what doesn’t even doing this for a while so use that knowledge of conversion rates in psychology and marketing and and upsells and everything to actually even massively better results and the other thing i think it on

45:13
E-commerce and I think you guys start seeing a lot of people not going to Shopify first or not going to Amazon first it’s going to be going to the AI engines you know chat GPT’s and Gemini’s and whatever emergence as a dominant if there’s another Google that comes out of this right now it’s chat GPT’s the dominant one but they’re going to be start searching in there and if you look at what Jas Andrew Jassy said just recently released a document to internal and basically say hey generative AI is coming

45:42
or embrace it, it’s going to change everything. so you’re going to search is going to change the way people discover products can change. And you just think about someone like Google or chat, GBT, even, or, and Amazon, they have massive data on you. And they have mass, they can customize specifically do what you want. mean, tick tock is the pre is the early preview of this. Well, tick tock knows how to target you with what, what are you most likely to buy on tick tock shop?

46:11
I mean, you’ve seen probably uh a lot of stuff that’s come through TikTok shopping or scroll. You said you bought a few that you like. That looks cool. No, I’m going to have a restraint. I’m not going to buy that, but that looks cool. No, I already got enough stuff. The wife will get mad at me if I put this on the credit card. And you’re also frugal. you’ll be um maybe, but you probably see a lot of stuff like, man, that’s kind of cool. That’s kind of cool because they know how to target you. That’s going to put on steroids when you put a whole bunch of big data that

46:40
Amazon’s been collecting on you for 20 something years and knows everything. Have you ever requested your, what Amazon knows from you? No, I haven’t. No. Did you do that? Yeah, I did that like a year and a half ago. It’s like 780 pages PDF. Okay. It’s every video I’ve ever watched on Prime, where I paused it, where I, how much of it I watched. was everything I’ve ever put in my cart, everything I ever bought took out, everything I ever looked at.

47:07
Everything I ever listen to, how many times I listen to Taylor Swift, you know, song or whatever, everything is in there. It’s eye opening what they got. And that data is worth a lot. And they can use that now with AI to really highly customize the experience for people looking to buy in e-commerce. Yeah, that is nuts, man. uh Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about this because people like I think most of my colleagues

47:35
have just been seeing traffic steadily decline over the years. And it’s because people aren’t doing research on Google anymore. They’re getting all their information from chat or any LLM. And then when they’re ready to buy, they’ll just Google the brand name and then go to your site and buy it there. Or they go straight to Amazon. So you’re right, I think. Or they still go to the store. mean, retail is not dead. That’s correct. They go to the store.

48:00
They’re not doing the research on websites anymore. Right. Right. Doing all the research and you might get like a branded search and then a click to your site for the part. remember I was at the uh the pattern pattern. If you don’t know patterns based in Salt Lake City, they’re the number one seller on Amazon. One point eight billion with a B dollars per year. Sixteen data scientists working for them. Amazon comes to them sometimes when they get questions on logistics and stuff. And I remember the CEO was on stage talking about

48:29
power of AI right now. He’s like, look, in my family, I’ve got six kids. Every time they turn 16, we offer to buy them a car, their first car. And we tell them like, hey, you might like a Toyota Corolla. You might like this. And we recommend a few cars that they might like. in the past, they’ve always picked one of those. And that’s what we got from them. They said, but our youngest that just turned 16, when we told her what to

48:55
we recommend for she’s a little on the middle as the and us to gbt she goes to check you can type and i’m a sixteen-year-old girl i like this like this i don’t miss with my friends and blah blah blah blah and came back and so you you should actually look at the jeep uh… whatever chair here or whatever whatever was this will be the perfect car so she goes back to dad and says i want to keep your key i want you recommend she trusted that and i gave her the answer

49:21
of what she wanted. You’re see more and more of that. And that just illustrates your point on what you just said, is it’s already happening. Hey, Kevin. I did want to get a chance to talk about some of the things that you’re working on. Billion Dollar Seller Summit, that’s twice a year. Do you want to tell the audience what that’s all about? Sure. I appreciate that. one time it’s virtual. So I do once a year virtually.

49:48
Next one’s coming up in August, August 19th to 21st. And it’s not just a, you see a lot of virtual summits and lot of Zoom calls and stuff. It’s not a Zoom. We use a platform that actually has like 3D renderings of the exhibit hall. It’s like, like it has breakout rooms. It feels as close to being at real conference as you can with ah just being at your desk. So it’s not a, it’s very interactive. It’s all done live, no prerecorded stuff. ah So that one’s coming up. And then I have one, the next in-person event.

50:18
is going to be in Nashville in April of next year. I’m changing the model in that it used to be exclusively a high ticket event. So there’s about $6,000 to come. then plus your hotel and airfare. So you’re making a pretty considerable investment to actually come. Last one was in Iceland, before that, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. But I’m changing the model in Nashville where there’s going to be a high element of it, but it’s going to be three grand instead of six grand. And then there’s going to be tickets as low as $497.

50:45
And I’m actually hoping that you’ll be out there because at the event I have a podcast row. So if you go to Super Bowl and always see at the Super Bowl there’s always this media row. All the ESPNs and Foxes and all these guys go and they interview all the celebrities and everything. So I’ve got 20 booths set aside for podcasters. It’s totally free as a podcaster host. Or you can have my wife quit her job booth and you can man it as often or…

51:14
as little as you want and can interview people while you’re there at the show and create a lot of content. uh So I’m doing cool stuff like that and we make it a make my events are an experience. They’re not a it’s not the same as this. Just go in a uh call uh conference hall and listen to some talks and maybe have appetizers at a mixer. We do full on experiences like in Iceland. We went snowmobiling on glaciers and we went create do crazy stuff in Hawaii. We did an amazing race type of event with

51:43
Everybody competed for a whole day racing around the island and 28 different rental cars wearing like jerseys that sponsored Jersey It looked like f1 Hawaiian style shirts and so we do a lot of cool stuff like that to make it a total experience and not just an event so those Billion dollar seller summit comm is the you want to find out more about those nice man And then I know I really like your newsletter also. I appreciate it anyone listening to it. You should go sign up It’s it’s over at billion dollar seller summit comm also, right?

52:11
You can get there or billion just go direct at billion dollar sellers.com. Yeah Well Kevin, uh, thanks a lot for coming on the show man. Um, this is a great conversation And it gave everyone a peek to what is coming in the next year or two and it’s happening fast It’s happening fast. So hold on. It’s going to be a fun ride. It’s an exciting time to be alive It’s like exciting time to be in e-commerce. Um, it’s it’s cool, man. I appreciate you having me on dude. Thanks a lot, Hope you enjoyed this episode

52:41
The e-commerce landscape is changing quickly and every marketplace is squeezing both sellers and shoppers. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 606. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com.

53:10
And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, quitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.