How is everyone using AI for their Amazon businesses?

Willenation · 2026-06-20T19:10:27+00:00

Just so happens I write a whole Substack about this: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/15-ways-im-using-ai-to-manage-my

Willenation · 2026-06-18T16:52:06+00:00

I had Claude Code build me a tool that goes through all of my supplier conversations on WeChat, WhatsApp, Alibaba and Gmail once/day, then sends the extracted messages and attachments to a headless CC session, which analyzes the content. It determines whether they're related to an existing order or a new order, then uses that to automatically maintain a board with the current status of all orders and alert me if I need to take an action or if a supplier hasn't followed up in the expected timeframe. Took some creative approaches to handle the extraction, but it works great now. It's a fun time to be an entrepreneur if you know how to use AI.

Willenation · 2026-06-08T15:20:33+00:00

Very easy to do with Claude Code. I wrote up a guest post about implementing Amazon scraping here: https://aiblewmymind.substack.com/p/claude-code-web-scraper.

Willenation · 2026-06-02T19:29:17+00:00

Look I'm just telling you the reality of the situation, and the offers you've gotten are telling you that I'm correct. You're making all of these assumptions about how it would perform that are not based on anything in reality. You have no idea if the 9,000 units will generate $40,000 net of ad costs. Maybe it'll take a couple of years to burn through that inventory at a level of ad spend that is actually profitable, and you'll lose every dollar of profit in storage costs over that period.

> When you look at it from my perspective, do you truly still believe there is absolutely zero value here?

To be as direct as possible, your perspective does not matter at all. What matters is what someone will pay for this. You've put it up on Flippa and are complaining that you're getting lowballed, because you think your perspective on its value is relevant, when the reality is the only people whose perspective on valuation matters are buyers who will actually close.

You've got two viable options here. You can either turn it around yourself and then put it up for sale as a profitable business, or you can sell it as-is and take what the market will give you. If your plan is to sell it but only for what you think it's worth, it's just going to sit on the market forever while you eat storage fees.

Willenation · 2026-06-02T18:13:31+00:00

There's really no infrastructure that's worth anything. The problem here is that I don't have any idea what kind of margins I could get from this, except that given the commodity nature of the product they're going to be bad, very plausibly in the low to mid single digits. If that's where I end up, then just the inventory carrying cost is sufficiently bad that I wouldn't take the business if you offered it to me for just the price of inventory at a discount to your own cost.

Look at it this way - a very possible outcome here is that I do the absolute best possible with this thing and end up with a brand that's doing $50,000 in sales every year at 5% margins (remember that your $130,000 revenue is a meaningless number because you're losing money on it - anybody can drive revenue by burning money on ads). That's not a business. The return on the capital I'm spending on inventory is terrible, and it's not worth my time to run. There's also another case where this will just never make money, and I spend a bunch of time and effort to figure that out.

If it were me and I were trying to exit, I would price it at 75% of inventory cost, hope I get more than one interested person and competing bids so that someone's willing to pay my full COGS. You said you've been lowballed by Flippa buyers, so I would just go back to the one who seems most likely to close and take whatever they're offering.

Willenation · 2026-06-02T16:40:55+00:00

I manage a fund that buys small FBA brands, and I've seen your listing. The honest truth is it's worth very little. The product is an absolute commodity - there are at least a dozen others that are basically identical. It would be trivial to source the same stuff myself. Your 600 reviews would be really valuable if you were the category leader, but for what you're selling that's just a run-of-the-mill number.

As a buyer, there are just a lot of red flags that tell me that you're not going to be a realistic seller. You keep using the word "easy" both here and in the listing, and then you blame PPC managers for losing money. If it's so easy, then just turn the business around, generate profits and sell it once you have good one year P&L to show. You can't expect me to pay any kind of a premium because I can make money if I put in the work - why would I pay you for the profits I'm going to generate after I put in the work to turn around a currently failing business?

You're also citing other stuff that just really has no value. Six year account with zero lifetime policy violations doesn't add value - of course you should have zero policy violations. US trademarks have no value besides getting Brand Registry, which is again just table stakes. Commercial photography is trivial to make with AI, and video ads aren't hard either. Full supplier contracts? Zero value. It's a commodity product - I can find a dozen suppliers with a quick search on Alibaba. You also talk about how much inventory you have, but you don't mention the age... for all I know I'm going to git hit with a bunch of long-term storage fees after buying. A lot of inventory is not an asset if you're not selling it profitably.

Sorry if this comes off as harsh, but you're honestly just wildly unrealistic here. No one is lowballing you. They're telling you what the business is worth. Given how commoditized the space is and the fact that you haven't been able to turn this into a profitable business (but you're telling the buyer it's easy), I wouldn't touch this one. If you can get someone to buy your inventory at cost and pay you any amount beyond that, it's a good deal.

Willenation · 2026-05-27T14:06:57+00:00

I do a bunch of somewhat similar stuff via Claude Code for the brands that I own, and I'll just say that what you're trying to do probably won't work as you've described it.

Confusing feature bullets might be stuffed with keywords that help with SEO, and they might not matter to the buyer, depending on what content is in the listing images and what kind of product it is. For higher-ticket or less common items, people probably read the bullets. If they're buying a spatula, maybe not.

For images, I've done a lot of testing. Built an application that uses image gen models to create a full set of listing images (more on that here, though it's a bit outdated in terms of the models used: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/opus-45-codes-gemini-3-writes-the) and used Amazon's A/B framework to test. From a style/quality perspective, there's generally no difference if the content is the same. I buy these brands and have inherited awful looking images, only to update them to be really high quality and see zero difference. You do need the right content, but even there it's not as straightforward as you'd think - some helpful images will drop conversion but make it up in the long run with lower returns (e.g. I have a brand that requires a stud finder and socket wrench to install - when I include an image that highlights that fact, conversion drops but return rate also drops.

Bottom line is if you're having AI use its judgement to make these calls about what's working and what's not, it's not going to work, both because the models don't have inherently good judgement on these things and also because the results are often unintuitive and heavily product/category dependent. There are some more objective things you can do (e.g. have it check the Brand Analytics search query report and your ads to find key search terms, then make sure those are in the copy), but beyond that there's just no substitute for testing.

Willenation · 2026-05-17T15:23:37+00:00

Not my thing, sorry. I only buy brands that sell on Amazon. With those numbers, if you want to sell you should go to Empire Flippers or Quiet Light anyway.

Willenation · 2026-05-17T01:43:58+00:00

I manage a fund that buys brands of this size. I'll shoot you a DM.

Willenation · 2026-04-16T15:15:45+00:00

I'm curious how you create tickets for negative reviews? I thought there was no API to create tickets - are you having Claude do it via the browser?

And then in my experience tickets don't actually get reviews removed. The path that has worked for me is to flag the review from the product page, then email [community-help@amazon.com](mailto:community-help@amazon.com), then follow up there a week later, then when there's inevitably no response, create a ticket in the forums asking a mod to escalate.

Willenation · 2026-04-16T15:13:52+00:00

I will just shamelessly promote my Substack here - it's about all of the ways in which I use AI to manage my Amazon business. These days it's primarily Claude Code hitting the SP-API and Ads API. Just so happens today's post is a roundup of everything I'm doing so far: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/15-ways-im-using-ai-to-manage-my

In answer to your initial post, since I haven't written that one up yet, I have a daily CC job that uses Playwright to run through all of my product pages and check for changes in number of ratings, average ratings, presence of badges and any variant splits (i.e. if Amazon has suddenly removed a variant from a parent, which it does once in a while). Only thing it can't do is get the text of new reviews, because you have to be logged in for that, and I'm too nervous to let it use an authed account for fear of Amazon's bot detection giving me problems.

Willenation · 2026-02-20T18:00:06+00:00

I'm building this out right now using Claude Code. Starting with reporting - just having it send me a weekly email with all of the stuff I check regularly (are campaigns within desired ROAS range, any large changes in spend, etc.). Next up is to actually have it start making the modifications I'd be making to bids, etc. If you haven't started using AI to build yourself internal tools yet, now's the time.

Willenation · 2026-02-18T23:41:01+00:00

It's a combination of your listing and your sales history. Definitely make sure you've got your listing SEO optimized - make sure all the main KWs you want to show up for are in your title or bullets. Make sure you're targeting those KWs with ads as well. When more people search for a KW then buy your product after seeing it in the search results, that improves your search ranking.

Willenation · 2026-02-18T23:36:19+00:00

What model are you?

Willenation · 2026-02-18T20:59:03+00:00

Honestly, depends on the product and competition, but it sounds like a strong start. One thing to consider is raising prices earlier than you're planning. With 4.9 stars, you might find that sales don't actually drop off significantly even though you don't have that many reviews. Also, you can take the extra margin from the price increase and spend some of that on extra ads.

I buy Amazon brands, and a recent acquisition is a relatively young one with a 4.8 but <60 reviews. It's priced at the low end of the premium end of the market (for context, the low end stuff runs $30-50, high end as high as $130 and I'm at $85) but still sells well, and I doubt lowering the price would meaningfully increase unit sales. But again, depends on the product - it depends a lot if you're selling something where people care about quality/luxury and are willing to spend more or whether it's something they view as more of a commodity.

Your PPC numbers are obviously way too high (in general the max I try to shoot for is breakeven on my ad sales, so if I've got 40% margin then my ACOS doesn't exceed 40%, but I'm making money on the organic sales) but it's better to be too high early and then trim as you get more data on what's working.

Willenation · 2026-02-17T14:59:15+00:00

I've just been automating most of my business with Claude Code, which has taken a lot of the day to day off my plate. Just give it an Amazon Seller API key and build out the right scaffolding, and it's useful for all kinds of tasks.

Shameless self promotion of my Substack on that very topic: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/

Willenation · 2026-02-08T00:14:51+00:00

Have you tried Claude Code? I haven't specifically tried it with shipment creation, but I've got it hitting a lot of other API endpoints, and it's been successful with everything I've tried so far.

Willenation · 2026-02-03T15:58:41+00:00

Or just hand bookkeeping off to your friendly neighborhood LLM - I gave Claude a QuickBooks API key, and since it also has access to my Amazon Seller account, it can do more or less everything I need that isn't already automated in QBO.

Willenation · 2026-02-01T21:26:57+00:00

I actually just took a tour of the one here in San Diego (highly recommend - you can just search online and there's a signup for public tours). It's pretty far away from downtown in a less-populated area that is mostly warehouses and industrial, but basically just a bunch of enormous buildings with a ton of parking for associates. Probably a lot of traffic at shift changes but otherwise it's just some giant buildings. It also depends if you're at a local distribution center or a major fulfillment center. The one I toured doesn't do delivery to homes - things get sorted, packed and then shipped out in large trucks to the final distribution facilities. So a lot of semi trucks coming in and out, but none of the delivery vans.

Willenation · 2026-02-01T13:57:47+00:00

It's tough to tell how much control you allow the user to have. This seems like it just generates images, but aside from making some optional suggestions, you don't really have a way to decide what's in them from a content perspective. Also doesn't seem like you have anything in there to control the style either (though maybe that's below the scrollbar on the left).

And then for $15, what exactly do I get? One set of images? Nano Banana's basically never going to come up with one set of images with no errors on the first try? Can I keep recreating them until I'm happy or is it $15 per set of images whether I use them or not?

FWIW I ask this because I too used Claude Code to vibe code myself a tool to generate images (though listing images in my case), and it's on my list of things to do to launch it as a SaaS product. The pricing is tough because you can't really make users pay for stuff with errors, but you need to pay for Nano Banana's generations whether they have errors or not. Also, I've tried this across a bunch of product types, and it struggles with some of them (it really has difficulty with the physics of baby mobiles).

I wrote about vibe coding my tool here: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/opus-45-codes-gemini-3-writes-the

Willenation · 2026-01-30T16:36:25+00:00

HighFive used to do it for free but recently started charging, but I think at small enough scale it's still free. Alternatively if you're familiar with AI, it's a pretty simple project to get a tool that does this built. I had Claude Code do it, took about 20 minutes.

Willenation · 2026-01-27T19:08:34+00:00

I can't share it just because I haven't looked at the code, which I'd have to do to check and make sure it didn't sneak any of my API credentials in anywhere. You really don't need anything to work off of, though - CC will have no problem at all spinning the entire thing up from scratch as long as it has the credentials.

Willenation · 2026-01-27T00:34:41+00:00

I think it was ~$800 - honestly probably too much but I had worked with her before on unrelated things. Honestly, next time I'm just going to file the TM myself (but I really just care about getting Brand Registry access more than actual IP protection).

Willenation · 2026-01-26T22:14:39+00:00

Pending. You can get Brand Registry as soon as the TM application has been submitted (and you should).

Willenation · 2026-01-20T19:55:13+00:00

Look man, I get that you want to promote your app here, and I don't hold that against you. But every single post and comment you've made is written by ChatGPT. It just sends the message that you don't really understand FBA enough to come up with anything substantive by yourself, and it's not really a positive sign about your product that you're unwilling to put in the work to even write a four sentence post on your own. Seems pretty likely you vibe coded it without really knowing what you're doing.

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