Mirza Rameez Baig, London (2026)

22/08/2026

FBA vs FBM. I've had this argument with sellers more times than I can count. Let's put both sides on trial.

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗔𝗦𝗘 𝗙𝗢𝗥 𝗙𝗕𝗔

Prime badge on day one. No badge, no click, for a huge share of shoppers who filter by Prime and nothing else.

Amazon handles storage, packing, shipping, and customer service. You're not answering "where's my order" emails at midnight.

Buy Box algorithm quietly favors FBA listings in ties. Same price, same rating — FBA usually wins.

Returns are handled for you. Painful, but invisible to your time.

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗔𝗦𝗘 𝗙𝗢𝗥 𝗙𝗕𝗠

You control the inventory. No surprise "your storage limit dropped" emails killing your best sellers in Q4.

No long-term storage fees eating margin on slow movers sitting in an Amazon warehouse for months.

Faster to fix mistakes. Wrong listing, damaged stock, pricing error — you touch it same day, not through a support ticket queue.

Better for large, heavy, or low-turnover items where FBA fees quietly become bigger than the product margin itself.

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗩𝗘𝗥𝗗𝗜𝗖𝗧

Neither side wins outright, and that's the actual answer nobody wants to hear.

Fast-moving, small, price-competitive products: FBA usually wins on visibility and convenience.

Bulky, slow-moving, high-storage-cost, or high-touch products: FBM often protects margin better.

The smartest operators aren't loyal to one fulfillment method. They run FBA and FBM side by side, product by product, and let the actual numbers decide — not a preference they picked once and never revisited.

Which side of this argument have you been on, and did the numbers eventually change your mind?

21/08/2026

Amazon doesn't reward the best product.

It rewards the best-explained one.

You can have superior quality, better materials, a smarter design — and still lose to a mediocre product with sharper photos, clearer bullets, and a listing that actually answers the question in the shopper's head.

The algorithm can't taste, touch, or test your product. It only sees what you show it.

Stop building a better product in silence. Start explaining it louder than the competition.

What's one product you've seen lose to a "worse" one, just because of the listing?

20/08/2026

Q&A from a call I had this week. Sharing it because five other sellers probably have the same questions.

Q: "Someone else is selling on my listing. Is that even legal?" A: Unfortunately, yes — if your listing isn't Brand Registered, anyone with the same UPC can attach to it. It's called hijacking, and it's completely within Amazon's rules unless you've locked the listing down.

Q: "How do I actually stop it?" A: Brand Registry first, always. Then trademark the name, not just the logo. A registered trademark is what gives Amazon's Brand Registry team the authority to remove unauthorized sellers fast, instead of you filing case after case manually.

Q: "What if my price is already the lowest, does that protect me?" A: No. Hijackers don't need to beat your price to win the Buy Box. Sometimes they undercut by a few cents and disappear once you react, then come back the next week. Price alone won't fix a listing-ownership problem.

Q: "Is this actually worth worrying about, or am I overreacting?" A: A hijacked listing isn't just a lost sale. It's lost trust. Buyers get a counterfeit or mismatched item, leave a 1-star review on your listing, and the algorithm punishes the product you built, not the seller who hijacked it. That damage sticks around long after the hijacker leaves.

The sellers who never deal with this aren't lucky. They locked the listing down before it became a problem.

What's a listing-protection lesson you learned the hard way? Drop it below, might help someone else reading this.

19/08/2026

Amazon and TikTok Shop are often talked about like they're competing for the same budget. They're not competing. They're solving two completely different problems.

I get asked constantly: "Should I focus on Amazon or TikTok Shop?" Wrong question. Here's the right way to think about it.

Amazon is where demand goes to get captured. Someone already knows they want a blender, they search "best blender under $100," compare five listings, read the reviews, and buy from whoever earns the click. It's a search engine with a checkout button.

You win by being the most convincing answer to a question someone already asked.

TikTok Shop is where demand gets created out of nowhere. Nobody wakes up searching for a mini waffle maker.

They see a 20-second video of one making the perfect waffle, laugh at the caption, and buy it before they've even finished the video. It's entertainment with a checkout button. You win by being interesting enough to stop a scroll.

That difference changes everything about how you should operate on each:

Amazon rewards optimization — keywords, reviews, pricing, inventory consistency, sponsored placement. TikTok Shop rewards creativity — hooks, creators, watch time, trends, comment engagement.

Amazon customers arrive skeptical and need convincing through proof. TikTok Shop customers arrive entertained and need convincing through emotion.

Amazon growth compounds through search rank and review velocity. TikTok Shop growth compounds through creator relationships and content volume.

Amazon is a marathon of consistency. TikTok Shop is a sprint of relevance, repeated over and over.

Most brands fail at one because they're running the other one's playbook on it. A perfect Amazon listing dropped onto TikTok Shop with no video strategy underperforms. A viral TikTok Shop hit with a thin, unoptimized Amazon listing behind it converts poorly once the traffic actually lands there.

The brands scaling fastest right now aren't choosing a side. They're using TikTok Shop to create the demand and Amazon to capture the demand it can't hold onto — content up top, search-optimized conversion underneath.

Two very different games. Same scoreboard: revenue.

Which one does your current strategy actually resemble — captured demand or created demand?

18/08/2026

A brand messaged me convinced TikTok Shop was "free traffic." Then we actually added up what they were paying.

Platform commission. Creator commission. Affiliate program fees. Ad spend on top to boost the video that was supposedly driving "organic" sales. By the time we finished the math, over a third of the revenue from their best-selling video was gone before it ever hit their account.

Nobody tells you this part when they show you the viral video screenshots.

TikTok Shop isn't expensive because the platform is greedy. It's expensive because most brands are stacking costs without realizing it:

Platform commission comes off the top of every single sale, automatically. Creator commission gets added whenever an affiliate creator drives the sale — and the good creators negotiate higher rates once they know they can move product.

Ad spend often gets layered on top to push the video further, even though the creator is already being paid to promote it. Discounts and coupons, which almost every high-converting TikTok Shop listing runs, come out of what's left after all of the above.

Individually, none of these feel like a big deal. Stacked together, they can quietly turn a "viral hit" into a break-even sale.

The brands doing this well aren't avoiding these costs. They're pricing for them from day one — building creator commission and platform fees into the product price the same way they'd build in a wholesale margin, instead of finding out the real number after the video already went viral.

If you haven't actually added up commission plus creator fees plus ad spend plus discounts on your last "successful" TikTok Shop product, the real number might surprise you.

17/08/2026

Your Amazon ads might be perfect. Your listing might be perfect. And you can still lose the sale in under 3 seconds — because the "Currently unavailable" button doesn't care how good your campaign is.

Stockouts are the most expensive mistake in ecommerce, and almost nobody tracks the real cost of one.

Here's what actually happens when a bestseller goes out of stock for even 48 hours:

Your organic ranking doesn't pause. It drops. Amazon's algorithm reads a stockout as "this product isn't reliable" and starts pushing your competitors up while you're gone.

Your ad spend doesn't stop bleeding. Campaigns keep running, keep spending, and convert at zero because there's nothing to sell.

Your loyal customers don't wait. They buy the next best option, try it, and sometimes never come back to yours — even after restock.

Your review velocity stalls. No sales means no new reviews, and a quiet listing looks like a dying one to both shoppers and the algorithm.

Most sellers treat inventory planning as a warehouse problem. It's actually a marketing problem. A perfectly optimized listing with zero stock is worth exactly zero.

The brands that stay ranked aren't always the ones with the best product. They're the ones that never disappear.

Check your inventory dashboard before you check your ad dashboard this week. One empty shelf can undo a full quarter of work.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗱 𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗺𝗮𝘇𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗮 𝗸𝗲𝘆𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱. 𝗜𝘁'𝘀 "𝗨𝗻𝗮𝘃𝗮𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲."

14/08/2026

I raised a client's price by 22% on Amazon. Sales went up.

Everyone told him this was insane. His competitors were racing to the bottom, cutting prices every month to stay "competitive." His margins were getting thinner every quarter and his ad spend kept climbing just to hold the same sales.

We looked at his numbers properly. His conversion rate wasn't a pricing problem. It was a trust problem. Cheap price, generic photos, thin bullet points, barely any lifestyle content. On paper, indistinguishable from ten other sellers selling nearly the same product.

So instead of competing on price, we did the opposite:

Rebuilt the listing with real use-case content, not just specs. Added comparison content that justified the higher price instead of hiding from it. Let go of the shoppers who were only ever price-shopping. Raised the price 22% and let the product finally look like what it actually was: the better option.

Conversion rate didn't drop. It went up half a point. Return rate dropped too, because the right customers were finding it now, not just the cheapest-price hunters.

Revenue per unit jumped. Ad spend efficiency followed because now every click was worth more.

The lesson wasn't "raise your prices." The lesson was: most sellers assume they're in a price war when they're actually in a trust war, and trying to win a trust war with price cuts just trains customers to expect nothing else from you.

Would you ever raise your price on a listing that isn't converting, or does that sound backwards to you?

11/08/2026

3 things I believed about Amazon Ads when I started. All 3 were wrong.

𝗠𝘆𝘁𝗵 𝟭: 𝗟𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗔𝗖𝗢𝗦 𝗮𝗹𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝗮 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗴𝗻. Reality: A low-ACOS campaign selling your lowest-margin product can lose money quietly while looking great in a report. Profit, not ACOS, is the scoreboard.

𝗠𝘆𝘁𝗵 𝟮: 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀. Reality: Past a certain point, extra budget on Sponsored Products just buys the same customers at a worse price. Growth stalls unless that spend gets redirected toward reaching people who aren't searching yet.

𝗠𝘆𝘁𝗵 𝟯: 𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹. Reality: Detailed, specific product content that actually answers a shopper's question is starting to matter just as much — sometimes more, especially as AI-assisted search reads listings differently than a scanning human ever did.

I spent real client budget learning each of these the hard way before I trusted the data over the assumption.

The Amazon playbook that worked in 2021 is not the playbook that works now. What used to be true stopped being true, and nobody sent a memo.

If you're running your account on beliefs you picked up years ago, it might be worth checking which ones still hold.

Drop a comment if you want me to break down any of these three in more detail.

10/08/2026

Your Amazon bestseller will probably flop on TikTok Shop. Here's why.

I've watched brands take their #1 Amazon product — great reviews, proven demand, solid margins — and dump it straight onto TikTok Shop expecting the same result.

Most of the time, it underperforms. Badly.

Not because the product is bad. Because Amazon and TikTok Shop reward completely different things.

Amazon rewards products that win on paper: specs, reviews, price, availability. A shopper reads, compares, and buys because the listing convinced them.

TikTok Shop rewards products that win on screen. If it doesn't look interesting in the first 2 seconds of a video, it doesn't matter how good it is — nobody sticks around to find out.

I've seen a $12 gadget outsell a "better" $40 version of the same category, purely because it was more fun to watch someone use it.

A few real differences that catch brands off guard:

→ Your best Amazon photos are often useless on TikTok Shop — they need motion, not angles → The product doesn't need to be innovative, it needs to be demonstrable → A boring product with a satisfying use-case (unboxing, "before/after", ASMR-style) can outsell a genuinely better one → Reviews matter less than the comment section under the video

If you're bringing Amazon products to TikTok Shop, don't ask "will this sell." Ask "will this stop someone mid-scroll." Those are two very different questions with two very different answers.

Which of your products would actually survive that test?

🔥 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝗻 𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗺𝗮𝘇𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻'𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝗻 𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝗸𝗧𝗼𝗸. 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗼.

09/08/2026

Weekend thought while scrolling Amazon on my phone instead of putting it down 👀

Most sellers treat every day on Amazon the same. Same bids. Same budgets. Same creative. Monday through Sunday, one blanket strategy.

But weekend shoppers are a different animal than weekday shoppers.

Weekday Amazon traffic is often need-based — someone ran out of something, a work purchase, a quick reorder. Fast intent, fast decision.

Weekend traffic is browsing traffic. People have time. They're comparing, reading reviews, adding to cart and coming back later, watching a product video twice before deciding. Slower intent, but often bigger baskets and more considered purchases.

Same platform. Completely different shopper mindset.

A few small shifts that tend to matter more on weekends:

→ Lifestyle and video content outperforms plain product shots — people have time to actually watch → Retargeting warm audiences from the week hits differently on a Saturday with nothing else to do → Higher-consideration, higher-price items often convert better when people aren't rushing → Customer reviews and social proof get read more carefully, not skimmed

If your whole week runs on one static bidding strategy, you're probably overpaying on weekdays and underinvesting on weekends — or the other way around.

Small tweak, but it adds up over a quarter.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend 🙂 — and maybe check your Saturday vs. Tuesday conversion rates when you're back at your desk.

Mirza Rameez Baig

22/08/2026

21/08/2026

20/08/2026

19/08/2026

18/08/2026

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09/08/2026

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