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Welcome back friend!

And a big welcome to the +66 new readers this week!

Everything is made up.

There’s no perfect time to start. January is not magic. Neither is Monday. Neither is next quarter.

Years are made up. Months are made up. Calendars are made up. Someone sat down one day and decided how time would be sliced, named it, sold it, and everyone else agreed.

Think about how much of your life is built on inventions. Someone made up Amazon. Someone made up money. Someone made up the New York Yankees. Someone made up the idea that you should wait until the “right moment” before doing the thing you already know you want to do. None of those things exist in nature. They only work because enough people believe in them.

Is this going to be the moment that you have the audacity to make something up? To make something up that matters to you? I hope so.

December 31st and January 1st are separated by one sleep. That’s it. You did not become a new person overnight. You did not gain permission. You did not unlock a hidden level. If you want to build something, write something, sell something, leave something, or start something, the date does not care.

We are all on a clock that doesn’t reset. That part is real. Waiting for an imaginary milestone is how people trade years of their life for comfort. Start now. Not because it’s a new year. Because it’s today.

✅The Instant Value Section (IVS)✅

(aren't you glad you opened the email now?)

Huge thanks to my friend Neha Bhuchar for providing this week’s IVS. Neha is the o-founder of atom11, Advanced Amazon PPC software. Prior to starting atom11, she worked with Amazon for over 6 years - working on projects like Prime Video ads and Unified Campaign Manager. Thanks Neha!

Evaluating AMC Audience Performance for Your Campaigns

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) offers a unique advantage of targeting Amazon audiences, not just keywords. With AMC audience targeting and bid boosting, you can bid higher for shoppers who have already shown interest in your products.

SFTB Note: It’s also free and accessible to all Amazon Sellers.

I see this as a more controlled bid optimization strategy (i.e. bid up and down). Instead of Amazon deciding which customers to bid up or down for, you define which audiences are most valuable: shoppers who have viewed your product or added it to their cart.

That said, not all audiences are created equal. Spending hours refining hyper-narrow segments often leads to minimal impact. To ensure AMC audiences drive real results, keep these three principles in mind:

1. Audience Size Matters

For an audience to meaningfully impact performance, it must be both large and relevant. A strong benchmark is 75,000+ users, with 100K+ being ideal. Smaller audiences rarely generate enough scale to influence campaign outcomes.

2. The Audience Must Be Material

If an audience is active in a campaign, it should account for at least 20% of total clicks or 20% of total orders of total campaign clicks/ orders. Anything below that (regardless of how low the ACOS is) is operationally insignificant and unlikely to move the needle.

3. Think Full Funnel

While it’s easy to boost audiences in Sponsored Products campaigns, doing so can limit the full-funnel value audiences bring. Testing AMC audiences in Sponsored Brands campaigns helps expand reach and improve exposure across multiple ad formats.

AMC audiences can be a powerful lever for improving conversion and efficiency, only when applied strategically. Following these three frameworks ensures your audience targeting is intentional, scalable, and impactful.

If everything’s solved, what’s left?

In 2026, a huge portion of Selling on Amazon is effectively solved.

Solved
Images: See Algofuse / Listingoptimization.ai / Keplo
PPC: See Adscrafted
Pricing: See Profasee
Listing & Ops: Hire any one of a million VAs looking for work
Capital: Get a loan easily (our recommendation: local banks)

Nearly Solved
Supply Chain & Inventory Management: Very close. I expect 2026-2027 to be the year that AI takes over this task. Until then, SoStocked 

Not Solved
Product
Sourcing

The “Not Solved” section is the part that still asks something of you. Finding the right product is not a simple prompt. It is taste, timing, and restraint. Sourcing a good rate is not software. It is conversations, leverage, patience, and walking away when the deal is wrong. Negotiation is still human. Relationships are still human. Mistakes are still expensive.

Most sellers keep pouring energy into the solved parts because they feel productive and measurable. Don’t do this anymore. If you want an edge in 2026, focus where the friction still exists. Product design & sourcing. Supplier relationships. Negotiation.

Happy New Year from the Beach

Happy New Year to everyone!  We spent a few days in San Jose for a chess tournament and decided we would go to an actual News Years party.  It was on the 29th so we actually had some time to recover from staying up past midnight.  Every year they throw a party in our neighbourhood and we are usually not here since we would rent out our condo during the holidays.  This year we were here and decided to actually go!  It was a good event and so nice just to be able to drive the golf cart to it!  

The Deep Dive (Premium Content)

See the "Return Ratio/Rate" for ANY Browse Tree Node

This is extremely useful if you're looking to launch a product in a certain niche. Using the niches in the Category Insights Section, you will be able to see the average return ratio.

If yours is above this, you're going to get one of those nasty yellow badges that are PDP poison.

If it's below the avg, you'll get a nice green badge (if not, you’ll get the yellow one).

Here's how:

1. Seller Central > Growth > Marketplace Product Guidance > Category Insights

2. Category > Product Type > Item Type (example: Home & Kitchen > Rug > Bath Mats)

3. You will be able to see the return ratio and various category stats!

Next steps: Check your category browse node return ratio. Then, compare it to your return ratio. Do you have work to do?

Do Not Hoard CC Points

Do not hoard points. They are not money. They are a liability on a company’s balance sheet, and the company controls the rules. Programs can change terms, suspend accounts, or shut you out entirely with little or no warning. When that happens, there is usually no appeal that matters.

Here’s a recent example where someone lost access to roughly $43,000 worth of points after his account was locked. Years of collecting, gone overnight. The company pointed to its terms and conditions and moved on. That is the risk people forget when they treat points like savings.

Points are best used, not stored. Redeem early and often. Holding a massive balance just means you are extending an interest free loan to a corporation and trusting them to play nice forever. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

Holiday Craziness

From December 26th until about January 4th it feels like half the country comes to the beaches in our area!  Shelves get low in the grocery stores and the traffic gets wild.  It seems that the key timing is people go to the beaches all day, then stay for sunset and then leave to go back to wherever they are staying.  From 6pm-8:30pm the traffic is busy (for Costa Rica)!  So if you are planning a beach day I’d avoid trying to drive around the beach towns during this time and either stay somewhere for dinner or miss the sunsets.

• Craig asks about importing products into the USA from Canada

• Max shares a full image stack made for $1

Painful Storage Fees Are Over — Finally

The storage fee pain is actually over. For real this time.

Amazon’s standard size FBA storage fees jump hard in Q4. From January to September, you pay about $0.87 per cubic foot. In October through December, that jumps to roughly $2.40 per cubic foot. That is a 176 percent increase, nearly 3x higher, just for inventory existing during peak.

That is why Q4 can feel so punishing. Extra units hurt. Safety stock hurts. Being slightly wrong on demand hurts.

January hits and the math snaps back to normal. Same products. Same inventory. Way less bleed. Storage gets cheap again, decisions get rational again, and you can finally restock without feeling like Amazon is charging you rent out of spite. Time to start sending in more buffer inventory.

How was today's newsletter? Love it? Hate it? Thinking about going to a place where “furnace” is a word never spoken?

• I loved it! ☀️☀️☀️

• It was okay ☀️☀️

• Not good. ☀️

To your success,

Rob & Max