Date: 9th of July 2026

Summary: Kevin King breaks down why a small "US Owned" flag badge on a main image wins on trust rather than patriotism, and why "US Owned" is legally safer than "Made in USA." He covers the shutdown of Amazon's Mechanical Turk and its black-hat ranking history, SPS Commerce's fire-sale of the Carbon6 seller-tools business, and fresh e-commerce stats and hot picks.

Key Points Discussed:

The flag test: in a five-way PickFu poll of 30 US Prime shoppers on a portable seat cushion, one image took 63% of first-choice votes — the winner carried a small "US Owned" corner flag, color swatches, and a weight-capacity badge
Shoppers cited trust, quality, and safety — not patriotism — reading the flag as a signal of a real, accountable company versus a drop-shipper
Quiet reads as trust, loud reads as suspicion: a hammered-in "Made in USA" or us-versus-them framing tested as "try hard" and "insincere"
"US Owned" is not "Made in USA" — the FTC requires "all or virtually all" domestic production for a Made in USA claim; match the claim to what you can defend, and test flag-on vs flag-off in your own category (hat tip Daniela Bolzmann's Social Proof newsletter)
Marketing Misfits episode with Norm Farrar and Drew Littlejohns on the dark side of seven-figure e-commerce success
Stats: Asia's e-commerce lead growing to a projected $3.7T by 2029 (up 38%), North America to ~$1.6T (up 31%), Africa fastest at 70%
The Turk is dead: Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk (closes to new customers July 30, 2026), the "artificial artificial intelligence" that powered research tools like early PickFu and a generation of black-hat search-find-buy, fake-review, and fake-journey ranking tricks
Why it's dying: AI now does the tasks cheaply, and a 2023 analysis found 33–46% of Turk workers were secretly using LLMs
Titan AI (software tool of the day): strategy-plus-execution for Amazon with human approval on every move, trained on 10 years of operator data
Carbon6 fire sale: SPS Commerce sold the 3P Revenue Recovery business (e.g. Seller Investigators) for $9.5M after paying $210M 16 months earlier, booking a $20M loss — a cautionary tale on owning your tool-stack leverage

Links Mentioned:

Hot Picks:

Stump Bezos Answer: Adding prompts to Sponsored Brands lifts conversion by 6%. (Amazon says 20% of shoppers who interact with a sponsored prompt continue the conversation afterward.)

Parting Shot: "The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle." — Steve Jobs

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