Amazon's ad dollars are quietly drifting away from sponsored products and into video and DSP.
TikTok just put AI in charge of its entire ad machine (while keeping the "buy" button firmly in human hands).
Scammers are impersonating Amazon at a record clip ahead of the holiday rush, and Meta, Google, and a fresh SEO study all have something to say about how shoppers find you next.
Here's what changed, and what it means for your business.
AMAZON NEWS
Amazon advertisers aren't just spending more ahead of Prime Big Deal Days — they're spending it somewhere new, and that shift says a lot about where the competition for shopper attention is heading next.
📣 What's changing
Media buyers told Digiday that client spend on Amazon Ads ran 15–40% ahead of last year heading into Prime Big Deal Days (Oct. 6–7), with full-year growth likely landing near a third. Amazon's own Q2 ad revenue was already up 26% year-over-year to $19.8 billion. The money isn't chasing more sponsored-product clicks, though — it's moving up-funnel into Amazon DSP, Prime Video, Fire TV, and live sports placements, as brands get better at measuring returns beyond Amazon's own site. Agency Tinuiti expects total Amazon spend up roughly 15% this year, with DSP spend alone climbing 25–30%, while MediaPost's forecast coverage notes PMG estimates average discount depth fell from 28% to 24% year-over-year, with sub-20% discounts becoming more common. Skai's performance recap points to the same trend: smarter, more efficient buying rather than brute-force discounting drove this year's results.
What this means for sellers
If your Amazon budget is still 100% sponsored products, you're increasingly the exception. Bigger players are funding brand-building plays — DSP, video, CTV — instead of just bidding on keywords, which means more competition for your organic rank as category leaders buy visibility outside the search results page entirely. And with average discount depth shrinking industry-wide, don't assume you need to match last year's 25–30% off to stay competitive on price — test a shallower discount with better placement first and watch your margin.
HOT TOPIC
TikTok used Advertising Week New York to unveil its biggest AI rollout yet — and the split between what it lets machines do for advertisers versus shoppers tells you exactly where this is all heading.
🛠️ What's changing
TikTok announced a new in-feed checkout called Buy Direct (built with Salesforce, Shopify, Shoplazza, and Stripe), a conversational Shopping Assistant, and a wave of advertiser-side automation, according to Relevant Audience's rundown. Smart+ now automates search ads end-to-end, GMV Max will factor in affiliate commissions, coupons, and referral fees so sellers can target a "true" return instead of raw revenue, and a new Agentic Leads tool qualifies prospects through AI-guided conversations. TikTok's Ad Network also opened to US advertisers, reaching nearly 400,000 third-party apps, per PPC Land. Notice what's missing: none of the shopper-facing tools buy anything without you clicking first. Unite.AI's coverage notes TikTok is letting software run wild on the advertiser side while keeping the final tap firmly with the shopper — the opposite of how aggressive Amazon's Rufus has gotten with autonomous repurchasing.
What this means for sellers
The advertiser-side automation is the part to actually use: GMV Max's shift toward true ROI (not just revenue) should surface which of your "best-selling" SKUs are actually profitable after commissions and coupons. But don't expect AI to start buying on shoppers' behalf anytime soon — research cited in the coverage shows only 4-9% of shoppers would let AI complete or add to a purchase without approval. The real opportunity is making your product data (sizing, shipping, materials) clean and consistent everywhere, since that's what TikTok's, Amazon's, and every other shopping assistant reads before it recommends you — or recommends a competitor instead.
BLACK MARKET
Every big Amazon sales event now comes with a matching wave of scammers wearing an Amazon costume — but new research shows this year's wave is bigger, faster, and harder to spot than ever.
⚠️ What's changing
Amazon-impersonation attacks jumped 188% between late August and September, according to KnowBe4 Threat Lab research reported by IT Security Guru. Check Point Research separately found newly registered Amazon- and Prime Day-themed domains rose from 905 in July to 1,284 in September — a 42% jump — with roughly one in 16 of those domains flagged malicious or suspicious. The campaigns are getting harder to catch, too: 75% changed display names, subject lines, or sending domains to dodge filters, and over 95% linked to fake payment pages or credential-harvesting sites cloned to look like the real thing. Generative AI is doing the writing now, scrubbing out the spelling errors that used to be the tell. Favorite lures, per Prosper Show's summary of the research: fake Prime billing or login alerts (31% of attacks), free-gift offers (29%), and delivery notices (25%).
What this means for sellers
Shoppers who get phished with a fake "your Amazon order" or "account locked" email often blame the brand whose product they were buying, not the scammer — so a spike in impersonation volume is a customer-service risk for you, not just Amazon's problem. Add a line to your post-purchase messaging reminding customers that Amazon will never ask for payment or login details by email or text, and keep an eye on lookalike domains using your brand name during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday run-up — attackers reuse the same playbook against individual sellers and brands, not just Amazon itself.
ECOMMERCE NEWS
A few other marketplace moves worth a scan before you close this email:
What this means for sellers
A few other marketplace moves worth a scan before you close this email:
What this means for sellers
Every major platform is racing to put an AI agent between you and the shopper — Meta's assistant now has enough memory to run a campaign largely unsupervised, and Google's agent is built to act across apps rather than just answer questions. That makes clean, consistent brand and product data even more valuable, since it's what these agents pull from. And if you've been treating SEO as a Google-only game, the AI Overviews split is your sign to diversify: your ChatGPT visibility depends on a completely different set of sources (Reddit, LinkedIn) than your Google visibility does (YouTube, social).If you run holiday deals on Amazon, get your Black Friday/Cyber Monday submissions in before October 20 — the early-bird discount window has already closed, but missing the deadline entirely means sitting out the event's deal placements altogether. If you run paid campaigns through ChatGPT's image tools, keep an eye on OpenAI's new ad unit — it's brand-new inventory with likely lower competition early on. And if you sell via Google Shopping, check whether the UCP hub has reached your Merchant Center account yet — native checkout on Google could mean one less step between a shopper and a sale. headcount cuts in selling partner services may be part of why — pad your expectations for response times this quarter.
