Send us a text

Marketplaces are sending a clear message this week. Risk, compliance, and execution now sit squarely with sellers, not the platforms. From Amazon brand protection and account health to Walmart returns, catalog limits, and AI-driven discovery, this episode breaks down how responsibility is moving downstream and why disciplined operators are pulling ahead.

In this episode, we cover:

Amazon brand protection remains reactive
Amazon reaffirmed how sellers must report unauthorized brand name changes. The workflow exists, but recovery is still slow, disruptive, and operationally expensive. Once a hijack happens, sellers are already behind. Clean Brand Registry status, documented ASIN ownership, and escalation readiness are no longer optional.

Account Health is now Amazon’s primary suspension prevention system
Amazon is positioning Account Health as a daily operational discipline, not a reactive alert center. Missed deadlines and incomplete documentation now carry real downside. Suspensions are increasingly execution failures, not policy surprises.

Why macro signals still matter for eCommerce operators
With Kevin Warsh nominated as the next Fed chair, rate expectations are shifting again. Softer short-term rates may support demand, but financing costs and capital discipline still matter. Operators need plans that work across uneven demand and funding environments.

Walmart tightens control on returns and catalog growth
Return exemptions are discretionary, not guaranteed. Item and selling limits are actively enforced. Walmart is rewarding clean execution and proven performance, not SKU volume. Growth is earned, not assumed.

Leadership changes signal platform direction
Walmart’s CEO transition points to continuity and scale with rising expectations. Target’s leadership reset suggests slower, more selective marketplace expansion. Sellers should align strategy to where each retailer is heading, not wait for policy relief.

Seasonal and emotional demand is still alive
Valentine’s Day spending is hitting record highs, reinforcing that demand has concentrated, not disappeared. Consumers still spend when the moment matters. Readiness, clarity, and fulfillment speed win in compressed timelines.

Retail therapy is reshaping conversion
Discretionary spending is flowing toward categories that deliver emotional payoff and immediate improvement. Listings that lead with outcomes convert better than those overloaded with specifications, especially in ad-driven traffic.

AI is compressing the funnel, not flattening marketplaces
Meta is betting on agentic shopping while Amazon and Walmart tighten control over how AI operates inside their ecosystems. AI rewards clarity, structured data, and clean execution. Vague positioning gets filtered out faster than ever.

Unified commerce is becoming table stakes
Retailers are moving from omnichannel talk to unified operating systems. Centralized inventory, fulfillment, and data are now required to meet rising platform expectations without creating internal chaos.

The through line
Platforms are no longer promising protection. They are demanding discipline. AI is not removing friction. It is relocating it. Demand still exists, but it rewards operators who execute cleanly, move early, and stay aligned with platform incentives.

Follow us on Selling on Giants on LinkedIn for weekly insights.

Send us a text

Ad fraud has the potential to drastically change online business, if we keep underestimating it.

In this episode of Selling on Giants, we sit down with Rich Kahn, Founder and CEO of Anura.io, to break down what ad fraud really looks like today and why it’s no longer a question of if you have fraud, but how much.

Rich has spent more than three decades in digital advertising. He didn’t set out to build a fraud prevention company — he built one after his own marketing platform was hit and he realized there was no credible solution on the market. So he built it himself.

This conversation goes beyond theory and headlines. We unpack how ad fraud actually works in the real world, how it hides inside legitimate-looking performance data, and why many brands don’t notice it until ROAS drifts, lead quality drops, and chargebacks show up months later.

What we cover in this episode:

• What ad fraud really is — and how it operates today
• The three main forms of fraud: bots, malware, and human fraud farms
• Why human-driven fraud is more common and affordable than most brands expect
• How fraud can inflate conversions and ROAS, not just hurt performance
• Why polluted data pushes ad platforms to optimize in the wrong direction
• Why affiliate and partner traffic often carries higher fraud risk
• The early indicators most teams overlook
• What you can do immediately to reduce exposure
• Why prevention beats trying to recover ad spend after the fact
• How AI-driven media buying is making fraud more sophisticated, not less

Guest Resources & Contact

Want to go deeper on fraud prevention, traffic quality, and performance protection?
You can access valuable tools, insights, and free resources from Anura, including their Ultimate Guide to Ad Fraud.

Website: https://anura.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richkahn/

Highly recommended if you’re serious about protecting ad spend, improving attribution, and scaling with confidence.

Send us a text

This week on Selling on Giants, the signal gets louder across every platform. Creative, pricing, and discovery all move faster, and the brands that win are the ones that can iterate quickly without letting fundamentals or compliance turn into the bottleneck.

We start inside Amazon’s ads stack where creative creation becomes more native and more iterative. Then we move into the less glamorous side of the business, chargebacks and dispute discipline. From there, we zoom out into the bigger shifts shaping two thousand twenty six: cross border pressure from Temu, tariff driven margin compression, AI powered shopping interfaces, and Walmart’s continued move toward curated category expansions.

Here’s what we break down in this episode.

Amazon Creative Agent inside Creative Studio
Amazon pulls more of the creative workflow into the ads stack so teams can concept, generate, and iterate faster. Creative velocity becomes a real performance lever once targeting and budgets are stable. We also cover where the tool performs well today and where you still need extra passes for labels, perspective, and in scale realism, plus what to prep now so you move fast with guardrails, not chaos.

Chargeback disputes are winnable, but outcomes stay buyer centric
Amazon reinforces tighter dispute windows and higher evidence standards, which means the cost of slow ops goes up. We explain why the operator move is treating disputes like cost control, not a one off appeal. We also walk through how to package documentation as patterns, build an escalation trail that holds up, and when a recovery partner like GETIDA becomes worth it for consistency and throughput.

Amazon’s Health AI agent inside One Medical and the bigger agentic signal
Amazon keeps pushing assistants from answers to actions in high intent workflows. The long term takeaway is that the moat becomes data access plus execution paths, not the chat interface. We also cover what stays the same: trust, privacy, compliance, and real outcomes still matter.

Temu closes the gap in cross border ecommerce momentum
Cross border keeps consolidating around platforms that reduce friction and uncertainty. This is a transparency and trust battle, not only a price battle. We cover what shoppers want most: landed cost clarity, credible reviews, and predictable delivery, and how brands protect conversion with tighter value communication and stronger differentiation.

Tariffs squeeze the margin math and there are few clean levers
Cost pressure forces hard tradeoffs between protecting conversion and protecting profit. We break down why doing nothing lets the algorithm decide through weaker rank and slower turns, how to run SKU level margin math and test pricing with intent, and how to build a trade down path with packs, bundles, Subscribe and Save, and smarter promo posture.

Retail’s AI commerce bet creates a reach versus ownership trade
Retailers chase demand through external AI shopping interfaces, but they risk giving up funnel control. We cover the two risks that matter most: data leakage and disintermediation, why clean structured product data becomes a competitive advantage in agent driven discovery, and how brands build retention off platform so the customer relationship is not rented forever.

The common thread
Speed is accelerating, discovery is shifting, and value pressure stays high. The teams that compound advantages are the ones that keep fundamentals tight, keep creative fresh, and make their catalog easy to trust and easy to recommend.

Follow