#207 TikTok’s $19B Quarter, Factories Slow Down Early and Amazon’s Temu Killer | Friday Week in Review

Did Amazon really launch a Temu killer, start selling used cars, and quietly rewrite your product listings for AI bots all in the same week? Yeah, and that's not even the weird part. Buckle up, buttercups. This Week in Review is gonna make your head explode. This episode brought to you by the letter V for victory. You thought I was gonna say voltage, didn't you? You cheeky twerps. All right, so if you thought last week was wild, this week in the e-commerce platforms took the rule book, fed it to an AI shredder, and then asked the shredder to optimize your conversion rate. Yeah, that just happened. So welcome back to the High Voltage Business Builders Friday Week in Review. If you're new here, this is where we break down what actually matters across Amazon, TikTok, Shopify, Walmart, and Google, and the rest of the e-commerce circus. Quick hits, real strategy, and the stuff that actually moves your margins. From operators to operators, we know and need to know what's happening right now to impact the business for the coming days, weeks, and months. So let's get into it. Surprise, supply chain tensions that no one is talking about. We ended last week talking about the 8-month manufacturing contraction in Asia. This week, the ripple effect finally started to show up in the numbers. While freight rates stayed flat and tariffs stayed calm, factories did not. China and Vietnam are both singling early Lunar New Year slowdowns. Factories are pulling workers early. Shutdowns and windows are being locked now instead of just January. That means your production window for Q2 inventory just got smaller. Upstream lead times are stretching, but not because demand is high. It's because capacity is shrinking. Factories don't want to run at half speed, so they are consolidating orders, stretching timelines, and deprioritizing smaller clients. And here's the kicker: big brands pulled forward their Q1 orders to beat any potential tariff turbulence. So here's my advice: move your Q2 production planning out by 4 to 6 weeks. If you normally place POs in January, place them now. Factories are slowing down early, big brands are already grabbing capacity, and smaller brands are the first to get If you wait, you are looking at April or May instead of production for February or March. All right, let's dig on Amazon's biggest power moves this week. All right, no more Batman voices, I swear. I swear. Let's talk about the part of the week where Amazon woke up, grabbed a cup of joe, stretched their legs, and said, what if we just disrupt 3 industries before lunch? Ha! Amazon decided it was time to kill Temu and shine like a Breaking Bad episode. They finally rolled out the full expansion of Amazon Bazaar. Their ultra low cost cross border shopping channel. Is it a bazaar or a brazer or brisure? I don't know. This is Amazon saying if customers want three dollar desk lamps and eighty cent socks, they'll buy them here, not on Temu. To me, this screams bad idea for any third party seller. I would not recommend you go there. But if you do, remember, bazaar is not cannibalizing Amazon retail. It's attacking the race to the bottom segment Temu created and shine. And the products are ultra cheap, fast fashion, low margin impulse buys. And Amazon's playing a global market share game, not a profit game here. This is really good news for brand builders if you're paying attention, because it's going to siphon away the bargain hunter crowd that keeps them from clicking on your listings. So if you sell premium or mid-tier products like we constantly hammer into our clients at Voltage, Bazaar will help you. If you sell cheap commodity items, you're in big trouble. Big trouble. Pivot or die is the lesson there. Amazon is also selling certified used cars online. Yeah, cars. I guess they decided that being a used car salesman didn't come through stupid enough with all the already existing clichés. So Amazon partnered with Ford to sell certified used vehicles directly through Amazon Autos. Wow. Ford, way to scrap your brand to the bottom of the pile. This is Amazon signaling something very important. They want higher ticket categories. They want financing. They want recurring revenue services. Now, why should e-commerce sellers care about this? Right? Huddle up. Amazon wants to enter the category. Here's 2 things that are gonna happen. The customer trust model will shift and the search behavior will shift. So people arguing with me about selling $50 to $500 products, they're wrong. Amazon can train people to buy a car online. Your $250 product now becomes low risk. Think about it. Average AOV on Amazon Prime Day in 2025 was $69. That hasn't really slowed down. This expands the comfort zone of every Amazon shopper. And the psychology ceiling goes up and that helps you. So stop dorking around with $50, sub-$50 products and elevate your game now. If you don't, I know a bunch of Voltage business builders who are gonna eat your lunch. Now, speaking of eating your lunch, Amazon extended its Grade and Resell program to more categories, and thankfully this one will actually give you more milk money. And it's actually a little bigger than people think, especially for our high-volume accounts pushing 30,000 units or more a month. Grade and Resell lets Amazon take your unfillable returns, assess them, repackage them, and resell them as used good or used like new instead of charging you disposal fees. Here's why this is going to matter. Your return losses will go down. Your refund bleed will go down. Your recovery margin from what used to be trash will go up, and your categories mean that more sellers will finally benefit from this. This is one of the rare Amazon updates that actually helps you. So Amazon has been quietly accelerating the testing of what they call Lightning Replenish AI. Oh boy. This is where Amazon predicts with its AI where customers are about to run out of something and pushes your product in front of them before they even search. Yeah. And that's like Rufus built for auto replenish. So if you sell consumables, supplements, beauty supply, household, pet, anything with monthly usage, this could be life-changing. It's gonna be great. Early movers will see this subscriptions revenue jump and late movers will feel like they were hit with an invisible ceiling. While on the subject of big invisible moves, I got word yesterday that Voltage just received a significant develop this week. We've been contacted by the Amazon team to become a premier partner as solutions provider under their Launchpad program. This partnership is a key step in expanding our ability to deliver cutting-edge strategies and support the community, reinforcing our position as a leader in e-commerce strategy. So. We get to do it directly with Amazon, with their support team, and those clients that come along with us are going to have access to those exclusive benefits through this partnership, including but not limited to a free year of managed support for qualifying new sellers on Amazon, includes a designated account manager, issue assistance, personalized insights, recommendations, early access opportunities to beta and pilot programs, and the potential to participate in marketing and deal opportunities like free Lightning Deals each week, free Vine reviews, and more. There's a new incentive benefits program extended to qualify new and emerging brand referrals, and there's comprehensive support from us and the channel partner to expand that brand or existing brand in 10x growth in 2026 and beyond. So these benefits are exclusively available for Voltage. So serious about building a fast-growing, high-profit brand? Direct one-on-one support from me and my team to 10x your brand growth and increase your net profit in 2026? Text me personally. I will respond. To 1-417-413-4209. That's 417-413-4209. If international, use that same WhatsApp number to message me. Use the keyword 207. Head over to voltagegm.com. If you're serious, connect with me personally on a no-pressure discovery call and apply to work with our team to grab that new brand or get that new brand growth. So now let's switch gears to TikTok, guys, because TikTok Shop did something this quarter that genuinely shocked everybody, including me. What has it done? All right. If you had TikTok Shop on your global breakout platform for 2025 bingo card, please stand up. Congratulations. Come get your prize. If not, you should have considered it and maybe you're not too far behind. So pay attention. I'm calling it. 2025 was the year of the breakout of omnichannel strategy. 2026 will be the year it roars like a lion and eats all the sheep who are not ready and willing to play ball. TikTok Shop dropped numbers this week that shocked everybody, even the analysts who expected them to win. There've been some things happening on those accounts and specifically our accounts too, and super excited for what it means through the breakouts in our seller categories. Get this, TikTok did $19 billion in global sales last quarter. That is more than Etsy. That is more than eBay and more than multiple Shopify verticals. So those of you spending time on Etsy and eBay may need to seriously consider where you're putting your time, energy, attention, and money. And that goes for Amazon sellers too. In the US alone, TikTok cleared $4 to $4.5 billion in 3 months, all driven by content sales. If you think TikTok Shop's optional, you're already behind. And here's the real shift. Consumables are blowing up. Grocery is up over 40% month over month. Snacks, supplements, household goods, personal care, they're all surging. These are repeat-buy categories. They build long-term brand value. And if TikTok comes to replenish the marketplace, Amazon Subscribe and Save will get smaller. So think about that. And remember, on Amazon, people shop. On TikTok, people discover. And whoever owns discovery coming up will own the next decade. TikTok's also pushing more traffic to US brands, mid-sized creators, and products with emotional or visual hooks. It's a huge advantage for Amazon sellers because you already have steady margins, inventory, logistics, reviews. You've got the infrastructure to win. You just need the content to get you there. So get this, there's an AI shift that is huge. Sounds pretty dramatic, right? Well, it could be for those of you playing along at home and not paying attention to your business. And you folks, you aspiring entrepreneurs, you better get in the game as these changes are gonna make it easier for you to compete. Now that the Chinese sellers are literally falling out of the platform faster than pieces on a mahjong board, there's a huge shift happening in e-commerce that no one's talking about. AI is now the gatekeeper. For years, you've optimized your listings for humans. That's Amazon's algorithm. Now you've got to optimize for large language models, shopping bots, AI overviews, and chat-based discovery. And this week, that shift met reality. Hello, reality! Flipkart and Amazon India confirmed that AI agents are scraping your bullets, rewriting them, and using those rewrites to recommend products. Yeah, the bot is the shopper now. Google's AI overviews are outranking product pages and choosing which brands get recommended. The game's no longer, how do I rank? It's, how do I get AI to choose me? Every major platform is fighting to own discovery. Amazon wants to own AI replenish. TikTok wants AI powered creators. Google wants AI search. Walmart wants AI cart fillers. Your job in 2026 is simple. Don't rank. Get chosen. So what does AI look like for now? Your listing has to read like a machine and to a machine, not a person. I know it sounds really strange, but here's what it prefers. Clean attributes. One clear benefit per bullet. Simple problem and solution. Plain structured language. Specs in consistent order. Images and reviews that match your claims. If your listing is confusing, clever, keyword stuffed, or messy, AI won't pick you. If AI doesn't pick you, shoppers won't see you, even if your product is better. And for those of you not keeping up at home, Nano Banana 3 just dropped from Gemini, and wow, what in the world just happened there? Images so crisp you can feel them. No more 6-fingered people. Prompts so accurately followed it's nearly impossible to tell the difference. I was restoring old black and white photos of my parents earlier. It is insane how well it is doing. It builds ads very fast. It's an easy system using N8N or VAs to crank out hundreds in minutes, literally hundreds of these images. ImageStack is so powerful that your brand can level up in minutes, not days or weeks anymore. Really, it's a crazy world we're getting into. And there's one thing for sure. In 2026, the operators who engage AI at the tactical level are going to win and win big. If it's a part of their overall strategy. So how do you win the discovery war next year? All right, here's the rule. TikTok discovers the platform. Amazon closes the sale. Amazon sees a tremendous lift in sales and TikTok helps you, you know, buyer use cases be defined better. Use both and you survive every algorithmic shift. Use both to train online AI systems while you can before your competitors do it. This isn't maybe, this isn't maybe in a little bit, I'll get to that. This is the competition battle for 2026. Ignore one and your growth will cap out. So here's the shakedown. AI is going to widen the gap between operators and dabblers and side hustlers. And maybe I'll dip my toes in the market kind of people even more. Businesses, builders who are literally building businesses to optimize machines, to grow for scale and differentiate their products are going to win because those folks don't marry their products. They set data boundaries and they tell it, you know, where they're going to go is based on that data. Dabblers are going to write for humans. And hope for the best. So guys, if you're officially scared by that and you want to know what to do next, here's the best part. Okay. Clean your attributes, cut the clever language, lead each bullet point with a benefit, make the problem and solution very obvious. Keep your specs structured, align images and reviews with the claims you lead in, and make sure your AI can read those images correctly. If your listing needs a clean machine to do it, you'll get chosen if you are a clean machine. And if you're not, you're going to get buried even with a better product. If you're an existing Amazon seller who is thinking about TikTok in 2026, there's a specific strategy that we've been working to grow my businesses very quickly. Heck, if you're even thinking about getting in the market, I can tell you that this strategy goes both ways. In some cases, it might make sense for you to start on TikTok first, then quickly back into Amazon. Haven't heard me say that before, right? But keep in mind, multi-channel fulfillment, MCF for Amazon, is where sellers change the game when it comes to opening additional channels. All of them connect to your inventory. All those platforms can snap on. To MCF, it's upgraded. It's even newer. It's faster. Okay, easier to use. These will open the other channels even quicker. So keep in mind, because that's usually the right first step, which is to open Amazon FBA warehousing and then open other channels because you have a single source of inventory that can move into multiple channels. So as operators, first and foremost, I test strategies on my own dime so I don't waste your time. If you're needing help opening, growing your TikTok channel, hit me up with the keyword TikTok to 4174134209. Let's discuss. Whether or not working together with you on your brand is a win-win for both of us. That's TikTok to 417-413-4209. Now let me shift gears here for a minute because yesterday was Thanksgiving. And given that I've spent 18 months losing 40 pounds, I really paced myself yesterday and I'm proud of that. I didn't end up having to wear my comfy pants, but I did have so much amazing time with my family. And we have had so many really great friends around us in the last day or two, more to come over the weekend. And we genuinely feel they're closest family. So I'm thankful for all the joy and time I had with good people, especially those older members of our family we know will one day leave a huge hole at the table. But at my house this year, that was not the case. And I hope it was the same for you. My second biggest thank you goes out to you, the valued listener on the other end of this podcast. I am incredibly grateful for you. And you've graciously kept listening over the year. You committed to changing your life, building a business, staying in the fight. It's what drives you. And we wouldn't be able to break down the volatile world of e-commerce without your continued support and engagement. So thank you for being a best part of what makes the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. Guys, that's it. That's the wrap for the week for the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast Week in Review. If your head's spinning, good. Means you're paying attention. Go back and listen to this again. Share it with someone else. Share it with an aspiring entrepreneur. Share it with a business builder who needs to grow faster and wants to go omnichannel and increase their profitability while doing it. Look, the platforms are shifting fast. AI is rewriting the rules. The gap between operators and dabblers is getting weaker and weaker by the week. Weaker by the week? Yeah, by the day. So if you want to be the— find the exact playbook to building a 7-figure brand, you want one-on-one support with skin in the game, text me again, 417-413-4209, keyword 207. Feel free to email me at neil@voltagedm.com with the same keyword. Or if you're in the product research mode, if you are in what the heck do I sell, who do I sell it to, go over and grab our Greenlight Product Research GPT. For just $5 at gpt.caymandata.com. That's gpt.caymandata.com. For $5, you're going to get some insights into product research avatar information to start the process of getting ready to implement that product data. It's just $5, guys. If economically you can't do that, then the whole business of e-commerce is probably not your game. Now remember, stay sharp, move fast, think bigger, and remember, your opportunity begins at the end of your excuses. So I'll see you on the next episode. If you're serious about building an e-commerce business starting on Amazon FBA, what if myself and my team worked with you one-on-one to execute the steps outlined in the podcast while helping you discover what the heck to sell, how to make sure it's profitable, and how to successfully launch a brand? Plus, how to do it under a consulting plus performance-driven model where I put a $10,000 skin-in-the-game guarantee for those that show up and are serious about building a real business done with us. If yes, text keyword profit to +1-417-413-4209. That's 417-413-4209, and I will personally respond with a few simple questions. If you're not in the US or Canada, please visit voltage dm dot com. That's voltage dm dot com. Click get started and book a no-pressure discovery call with me or a member of my team to learn more about the Business Builders one-on-one coaching and mentoring for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and those looking to build an empire or retire using the power of e-commerce. Once again, thank you for listening, and be sure to tune in next week for a brand new episode of the High Voltage Business Builders podcast.