Amazon stopped asking how much you sell

Good morning.

If you've got a container sitting in Los Angeles or Long Beach, find out today how many free days you have left.

IN TODAY'S ISSUE

Let's get into it.

LOGISTICS

About 250 people who check gates and watch cargo at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach can walk out at 5pm Pacific on Wednesday. They've been without a contract since July 2025. Their employers' group says it doesn't expect other dockworkers to cross their picket line, so a few hundred people can stop the cranes, the yard, and the truck gates.

These aren't the longshoremen. The big West Coast dock contract runs to 2028, and those workers aren't party to this at all. The watchmen are a separate, much smaller group, and the terminals where they work handle about 85% of Long Beach's cargo, by the employers' own count.

The original deadline was Sunday; a federal mediator is in the room, and as of Monday, the talks were still going with nothing agreed. Neither side has said in public what they're arguing about.

Your storage clock doesn't care how that goes. A box that's already been unloaded starts burning through its free days whether the gate is open or not, and nobody has promised that the meter stops if the terminals go quiet. Once the free days run out, you pay the storage bill.

DISCOVERY

A family-run florist in Spain says 23% of its October orders came from people who found it in ChatGPT. Every single one of those orders came from somebody who had never bought there before.

Only about 1 in 8 of those orders showed ChatGPT as the referring site. The other 7 looked like direct traffic, or like nothing at all. The shop found them because Shopify stores the first and last visit before every order, and ChatGPT's tracking tag on its own links was sitting in all of them. If you check your referrer report and conclude ChatGPT isn't sending you anything, you've checked the one field that doesn't record it.

Meanwhile, the shopping robots everybody is building for have bought almost nothing. DoorDash's chief executive said last Thursday that outside AI agents have placed "several hundred orders in total" on a platform that does roughly 3 million deliveries a day. eBay put it more politely on its earnings call: agent referral traffic is very, very small today. Shopify spent last Wednesday opening its catalog, cart, and checkout to any agent that wants them and says every store is agent-ready by default. The plumbing is arriving years ahead of the water.

FEES

Until Monday, Amazon wanted a $1 million liability policy once you cleared $10,000 in monthly sales. From November 2, it wants one regardless of what you sell in a month, if what you sell is on a list. Amazon says the policy applies "regardless of whether they meet the USD 10,000 gross proceeds in a month threshold," and it applies to listings you already have up.

The list is wider than the phrase "safety categories" suggests. It includes car seats and toys. It also includes supplements, eye drops, smoke alarms, mattresses, life jackets, tires, and anything with a lithium battery. That last one pulls in many ordinary consumer electronics and small kitchen appliances. If you sell a thing that plugs in or charges up, assume you're on it until you've checked.

Amazon announced this on September 3 and still hasn't said what happens to a seller without the cover. Seller Services says listings in those categories get switched off after a warning email, and Amazon doesn't mention that anywhere. Nobody can tell you today whether a clock is running on your account.

Steal this 👀

Cotopaxi is running a new limited product every other day from November 1 to November 11 instead of saving everything for one sale, and it told Modern Retail the point is to pull attention earlier in the month rather than fight for it in the promotional window. The second reason is less obvious and more useful to you: five small releases require less upfront stock than one big event.

Your version is five dates on a page and five things you already own. Make it a bundle, a color you have too many of, or a gift box of three samples. Do two things while you set it up. Write all five dates on the page before the first one goes live, because a published calendar is the only version of this that makes anybody come back. Then cap each release at a number you'd be happy to sell out of by lunchtime.

FROM FULFILLYN

Missed ship dates, surprise fees, slow replies. If any of that sounds familiar, tell us what you sell and how much you ship. We will match you with vetted 3PLs that fit your volume, channels, and budget.

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Or just reply to this email with what you ship.

Meta's new terms are on hold. Last week we told you Meta's commercial terms take effect November 20, and there's no opt-out. Meta said on October 28 that it's consulting industry groups first and expects that could run past November 20, in which case it delays the terms. Its existing terms stay in place until then. Publishers and advertisers objected to a clause giving Meta broad rights over their content for its AI products, and complaints have landed with EU and UK competition authorities. Nothing is canceled, so the wholesale sheet behind a soft login still wants to move, but you've more than two weeks to do it.

Amazon is listing 250 million products it doesn't sell, and sellers are in unless they opt out. Amazon's Shop Direct links now point at 250 million items on other companies' websites, about 2.5 times the March figure, and the goal is to stop shoppers wandering off to an AI assistant to find things Amazon doesn't stock. Eleven merchants and agency staff said they get no warning when their products show up, see very few sales from it, and sometimes find the wrong details attached or a link pointing at a reseller they never authorized. Amazon says it's building reporting so brands can track the traffic. Search your best seller's exact product name on Amazon and see whose site the result sends people to.

Amazon is automatically refunding some inbound fees. Amazon has relaxed two timing rules for international shipment plans created between August 1 and November 30 and is refunding the defect fees it already charged. Related shipments in a multi-destination plan now have 45 days to arrive after the first one is received, up from 30, and automatic closure now extends to 90 days. Amazon says no action is needed, and the money shows up in your Reimbursement report. Plans you created before August 1 aren't covered, so check the dates before you assume a charge is coming back.

Etsy can train AI on your listings from December 16. Etsy's updated terms, published October 26, give it and its partners explicit permission to use your photos, descriptions, videos, and reviews to develop and train AI models. There's no general way for a US seller to keep selling and keep their work out of it. The license you already granted is perpetual, so closing a shop or deleting a listing may not end Etsy's permission to use what you uploaded. The same update also lets Etsy block outside shopping agents from scraping the site. That's the half of it Etsy would rather you noticed.

Shopify has already written your store's answers for AI shoppers and is waiting on you. There's a page in your admin under Sales channels, called Agentic, holding facts Shopify drafted from your own storefront: your return window, where you ship, whether you do gift notes. Shopify says nothing it drafts reaches an AI agent until you publish it. So if a shopper asks ChatGPT what your return policy is and nobody's published one, the answer comes from wherever the machine can find it. Fifteen minutes with that page is the cheapest thing on this list.

eBay is rewriting your listing titles for ads on other websites, and there's no switch. eBay's new controls for its off-site ads let you prioritize and deprioritize listings by price, category, condition, age, and stock, but you still can't exclude a listing outright, and deprioritized items stay eligible. Buried in the same announcement: eBay rewrites your titles with AI for the ads it places elsewhere, at no charge, with no way to turn it off and no way to see them first. Your title on eBay stays as you wrote it. The one a stranger sees on somebody else's site doesn't.

Google will start handing full visitor IP addresses to ad tags, unless you say no. Starting January 11, tags for Google Ads and related products will accept the full IP address rather than a trimmed one for sites running Google's server-side container. Analytics tags keep redacting it. It's on by default, Google's email points to a help page for the opt-out without naming it, and European traffic still falls under consent rules. If you're not sure whether you run server-side tagging, you almost certainly don't, and this one isn't yours.

That's the week.

See you next Wednesday.