Amazon just trimmed its own workforce — and some of the teams getting cut are the ones sellers call when something breaks.
A new report shows TikTok Shop's winners aren't the sellers with the biggest catalogs. They're the ones posting video like it's a full-time job.
Big Deal Days brought a fresh wave of Amazon-impersonation scams, and Amex just built new guardrails to stop AI shopping agents from getting fooled.
Here's what changed, and what it means for your business.
- 📉 Amazon cut jobs in Seller Support — right as Big Deal Days wrapped
- 🎥 TikTok Shop's top sellers aren't bigger — they just post way more video
- ⚠️ Big Deal Days brought a fresh wave of Amazon-impersonation scams — here's the playbook
- 📊 Quick hits: AI agents chase $100B in sales, Walmart tests in-store pickup, and Walmart DSP lands on Spotify
AMAZON NEWS
Amazon trimmed its own workforce just as Prime Big Deal Days wrapped up — and the teams reportedly affected are the ones many sellers call when something breaks.
📉 What's changing
Amazon confirmed it cut fewer than 1,000 white-collar roles in its Stores division — the unit that runs the core ecommerce site — with employees in the US, India, and the UK affected, according to Reuters, via Khaleej Times. Internal Slack posts cited by Fox 13 Tampa Bay point to customer service and selling partner services among the teams hit, with Amazon saying only that it had "adjusted parts of our Stores business." Other coverage notes the timing: the cuts landed right as Big Deal Days — one of Amazon's biggest shopping events — wrapped, and follow an earlier round of roughly 16,000 jobs cut earlier this year as part of a broader 30,000-role reduction that began in 2025.
What this means for sellers
If your Seller Support tickets have felt slower to close, this is likely why — selling partner services is one of the teams reportedly affected, right as Q4 ticket volume is about to spike. Don't sit on anything revenue-affecting: escalate suppressed listings, held funds, or account health flags through every channel you have — phone, chat, your account manager if you have one — because the team on the other end just got smaller heading into the busiest stretch of the year.
HOT TOPIC
TikTok Shop's Top Sellers Aren't Bigger. They Just Post Way More Video
A new report shows a shrinking slice of TikTok Shop sellers is walking away with most of the money — and the dividing line isn't audience size, it's whether you treat the shop like a media channel.
🎥 What's changing
Marketplace Pulse's new TikTok Shop Trends Report 2026, built from more than 150,000 US sellers and 4.5 million products, found that the 8% of sellers who've posted 1,000+ videos account for roughly 60% of estimated sales, while the 39% with 50 or fewer videos take just 5%. The median shop with zero videos has sold 96 units lifetime; past 1,000 videos, that jumps to 15,590 — about 160 times as many. Catalog size and follower count barely move the needle: the median top-1% seller lists under three times as many products as everyone else but posts 14 times as many videos, and separate coverage of the report notes some top performers reached the top ranks with fewer than 10,000 followers. Two-thirds of what sells at the top is worn, applied, or ingested — beauty alone is close to 30% — and Marketplace Pulse's write-up frames content as the moat around a product that already passes the "fifteen-second test." It's a moat that resets constantly, too — nearly half of this month's top 100 sellers weren't in the all-time top 100.
What this means for sellers
On TikTok Shop, a storefront isn't a warehouse with a search box — it's a media channel with a checkout attached, and the data says output beats audience size every time. If you're sitting on a catalog but posting sporadically, the fix isn't more products, it's more video: aim for a steady posting cadence on your best-fit SKUs (worn, applied, or ingested categories convert hardest) instead of spreading thin content across your whole catalog.
BLACK MARKET
Prime Big Deal Days Brought a Fresh Wave of Amazon-Impersonation Scams
Amazon is already one of the most impersonated brands in phishing — and Big Deal Days just handed scammers their best script of the year.
⚠️ What's changing
Security researchers at Bitdefender flagged three scams doing most of the damage heading into October's Big Deal Days: fake delivery, payment, or "suspended account" alerts that push shoppers to lookalike login pages; fake Amazon support calls that pressure victims into sharing one-time codes or installing remote-access software; and fake "exclusive" deal ads and mystery-box offers on social media that harvest card details through a small "shipping fee." Big sales events are exactly when a "your order has a problem" email looks plausible — and the fraud risk is reshaping how platforms build, too. Just days earlier, Amex introduced a framework that captures and authenticates a shopper's purchase instructions and budget before letting an AI shopping agent check out on their behalf, specifically to block unauthorized or mismatched transactions as agentic shopping grows.
What this means for sellers
Shoppers who get phished with a fake "your order" email often blame the brand they were buying from, not the scammer — so this is a customer-service risk for you, not just Amazon's problem. Add a line to your post-purchase emails reminding customers that Amazon never asks for payment details, passwords, or one-time codes by phone, text, or email, and keep an eye on lookalike domains using your own brand name as Black Friday approaches — the same playbooks get reused against individual sellers, not just the marketplace itself.
ECOMMERCE NEWS
Quick Hits: AI Agents Chase $100B in Sales, Walmart Tests In-Store Pickup, and Walmart DSP Lands on Spotify
A few other marketplace moves worth a scan before you close this email:
- 💵 AI agents could become a $100B sales channel within a year — Triple Whale data already shows AI-attributed orders up over 100% since BFCM 2025, and new forecast coverage pegs the channel at $100 billion in sales within the next year, according to MediaPost.
- 🏬 Walmart is testing in-store pickup and delivery for third-party marketplace orders, letting eligible seller inventory ship straight from nearby stores instead of a warehouse ahead of the holidays, per Adweek.
- 🎧 Walmart DSP now runs ads on Spotify, matched to Walmart's own purchase data and measured against in-store and online sales across 4,600+ stores — following Amazon's own Spotify ad move a year earlier, according to PPC Land.
What this means for sellers
AI-driven traffic, Walmart's retail-media expansion, and omnichannel fulfillment are all pointing the same direction: the channels bringing you buyers are multiplying, and each one wants clean product data and a profitable ad budget to go with it. If you only sell on Amazon, keep an eye on how fast Walmart's retail media and fulfillment options are catching up — the audience and the ad inventory are both growing fast.
