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The My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast With Steve Chou
606: Kevin King On The Future Of Ecommerce: Amazon vs DTC In 2025
00:53:21
In this episode, I’m joined by Kevin King, a veteran Amazon entrepreneur, mentor, and educator you probably know from the Freedom Ticket course and his two podcasts. Kevin also runs the Billion Dollar Sellers Summit and a popular newsletter where he sh...
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- [00:00]
Steve Chu
Welcome back to the Podcast the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e commerce and online business. In this episode I am joined by Kevin King, a veteran Amazon entrepreneur, mentor and educator you probably already know about from the Freedom Ticket course and his two podcasts. Kevin also runs the Billion Dollar Seller Summit and a popular newsletter where he shares insider strategies with some of the top minds in e commerce. Now today we're diving into where Amazon is headed, the future of DTC and what these shifts mean for anyone selling online. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over@sellersummit.com and if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most ecommerce conferences that are filled with high level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step by step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches. People who are running their own e commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers and scaling real businesses. There are no corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate big events so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We have sold out every single year for the past nine years and I expect this year to be no different. It is happening April 21st to the 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and if you're doing over 250k or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for higher level sellers. Right now tickets are the cheapest they're ever going to be, so if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. That's sellersummit.com now onto the show. Welcome to the My Wife Coder Job podcast.
- [01:52]
Today I'm thrilled to have have Kevin King on the show. Now Kevin is someone who I met a long, long time ago, but we didn't actually really have a conversation until we both got booted off the live stream to tens of thousands of viewers at the Alibaba Co Create conference. Kevin is a veteran entrepreneur, mentor and educator and if you sell on Amazon, you've probably seen his face from his Freedom Ticket course, which I believe is still given out for free by Helium10 if you have a subscription. He's the co host of two podcasts, the Marketing Misfits podcast and the AM PM Podcast where he shares insider strategies and he also runs a conference called the Billion dollar seller summit. And finally, he runs this amazing Amazon newsletter, which I recommend that everyone subscribes to. Now, today, I invited Kevin on the show to talk E commerce and where he sees things going with Amazon and D2C. And with that. Welcome to the show, Kevin.
- [02:52]
Kevin King
Hey, I'm glad to be here, Steve. It's nice to. Nice to see you again.
- [02:56]
Steve Chu
So I actually didn't really want to mention Alibaba. I was debating myself whether I should mention Alibaba because, you know, they're so sensitive about that sort of thing. But it really was the first time that we got a chance to connect, right?
- [03:07]
Kevin King
Yeah, it was. And it was. You know, that was kind of weird. I was in the taxi on the way to that show in the morning, and I think we were on stage that afternoon, and the organizer lady that's coordinating us calls and says, hey, Kevin, I want to switch this around. I had Tim kind of hosting your panel because it's the three of us, me, you, and Tim. And. And so I want you. I'm afraid he might say something, so I'm gonna have you host the panel, if that's okay. And I'm like, well, I guess you don't know me, because I might say something, too, but. But okay, I didn't say that to her. That's what I'm thinking. So I was like, yeah, sure. So we get up there, and beforehand they had come to us and they said, hey, you can't talk about solar panels. You can't talk about. There's. There's a few things you had to be careful about. It's because this was being live streamed back to. I think it was millions of people. And.
- [03:54]
Steve Chu
Okay, I didn't know that it was.
- [03:56]
Kevin King
It was a lot.
- [03:56]
Steve Chu
Yeah.
- [03:57]
Kevin King
And so we go up on stage and we're doing our bit and talking about Alibaba and Amazon and sourcing and all kinds of stuff. And then about. I think. I think we had 25 or 30 minutes total, and there's a little countdown timer. And so as I'm asking you and Tim questions and going back and forth, I'm looking at the counter, and I saw at one point it was like 16 minutes left. And then I asked a question of one of you two, and then I looked over and it was almost. It was at three minutes. I was like, man, in my head, I was like, did I just black out? I think I asked you guys that at the. And when we got out, I was like, did y' all see that timer jump down or what happened? That Blackout or something on stage. And y' all are like, no, we weren't paying attention. And then we get off, and then we. We go down and we're like, what? Someone comes up to us and says, hey, we had to cut the feed because y' all said something you're not supposed to say. We're like, what do we say? And we couldn't figure it out. We thought maybe it's because we said YouTube, and YouTube is banned in China. But it turns out that a few. About a week later, the lady calls me, said, don't worry about it. You guys were voted the most popular panel at the event, despite this. And it was because you were talking. You weren't talking enough about Alibaba. You're talking about some Amazon stuff and other things. And, like, okay, Tim got invited back the next year, so they weren't too, too mad.
- [05:16]
Steve Chu
Oh, okay. Well, I. Did I get invited back? I don't remember. Probably not. Anyways, okay, so what did I want to talk to you about? So, first of all, you got a lot of things on your plate. I've always been curious, like, what are you actively working on right now? Are you still actually selling on Amazon products that you actually directly manage in addition to everything else?
- [05:41]
Kevin King
Yeah, we. I. I do. I have a seasonal business on Amazon. I mean, when I first started selling on Amazon 10 years ago, I had five different product lines and multiple SKUs under each of those. Five different brands. One in pets, one in fitness, one in beauty, one in electronics, and one in a kitchen. And I launched all five of those and ended up narrowing that down to a couple. And. But since, I don't know, 1995 or.
- [06:08]
Steve Chu
Something, I know that's.
- [06:09]
Kevin King
Yeah, I've been producing wall calendars. Seasonal wall calendars. And we. We had a D2C list on that that we did a lot of direct mail, and we still do direct mail. For those young ones listening, direct mail means you send something with a stamp through the mail and it goes in a mailbox.
- [06:25]
Steve Chu
No one knows what that is, Kevin.
- [06:26]
Kevin King
It's a physical mailbox.
- [06:27]
Steve Chu
Yeah.
- [06:30]
Kevin King
Send checks and money orders. Those are little pieces of paper that say, hey, to the pay. To the order of a money order, you can get 7 11. You pay like 79 cents or something for the fee. Takes cash anyway, so I been doing that for a long time. So I still do that with Amazon. And we wholesale into, like, calendars.com, which is the big kiosks in the malls as you see pop up during the holidays and a few other places. And that keeps my hand in the Amazon business. So we have 10 different SKUs that we do. There's. So that way, I'm still selling, I'm still familiar. Because I think you can't teach if you're not doing it. I mean, you get out of dates really quickly. You know, things change rapidly, and they're changing even more rapidly now. So the long. That was a long answer to say, yes, I still sell. Still sell, Steve.
- [07:22]
Steve Chu
And then I mentioned the two podcasts, and I know you're launching something else right now, right?
- [07:28]
Kevin King
Yeah, I have the two podcasts which you've been on, the Marketing Misfits podcast. It's great to have you on there. That was an awesome episode that I do with Norm Farrar. And then I do1 for helium 10 called. It's called AMPM Podcast, which is. That's pretty much all Amazon focused. And then Marketing Misfits is general marketing focused. And then I, I have the newsletter like you mentioned, Billion Dollar Sellers, that comes out twice a week. I've been doing that, Been doing the Marketing Misfits podcast a year, the AMPM podcast about three. I took that over from the founder and I been doing the newsletter for two. And then, yeah, I have something else called BDSC about to come out. That's. Yeah, I'm not announcing.
- [08:10]
Steve Chu
Oh, you're not announcing. Okay, we don't have to talk about that. We can talk about that.
- [08:12]
Kevin King
I'm just, I'm teasing it right now. Getting people to try to figure out what is. What does that C stand for? Because I have my events, bdss Billion Dollar Seller Summit.
- [08:22]
Steve Chu
Right?
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Kevin King
And then I have the newsletter, bdsn. Billion Dollar Solar Newsletter. So now I have a C. And people are like, what is this? Club committee, conference, crypto. I don't know, something left. So I'm just hyping it.
- [08:36]
Steve Chu
All right, this is what I wanted to talk to you about. So Amazon has directly and indirectly implemented a ton of fee hikes in just the past year and a half. And clearly, at least in my mind, the Amazon gold rush, where anyone can do this successfully is. Is over. So my first question to you is, what do you say? What would you say are like the prereqs today to start selling on Amazon? And what should be people be mentally.
- [09:02]
Kevin King
Prepared for if you're new? I agree with you. The gold rush is over. You don't see all the, the guys with their Ferraris put nearly as much on social media trying to sell courses. Courses, because of AI, are becoming, you know, a Lot of people have been making money off selling courses and a lot of that's going to go away because of, to get into it. Today it's a real business. You know, 10 years ago you could just, you could just pop on and find something on Alibaba, stick a brand name on it that you made up and put it on there and go sit at the beach and listen to your phone ding all day and make a lot of money and get lots of reviews. Those days are long gone. Now it's a real business. You gotta wear, know a lot of hats. You got no logistics, sourcing, inventory management, finance, marketing, customer service, I mean the whole range. It's become a big, it's a real business now. And so it's the people that want to get into it and they say, how much do I need to get into this? You know, I, I used to have a rule that when I would tell people you need two and a half times your land, your initial landing cost. So if, if your life savings was 10,000 bucks, let's say that's what you had to invest in this. You needed to find a product that you could get landed for four grand maximum and you not run out of stock. So there's a lot of various math formulas you got to do and I show that kind of stuff in the Freedom Ticket. That way you have money to actually buy the next round. Before you got paid for the first round, you'll be able to continue. But I think that number depends on your goals. If you're in Pakistan and you're making six or six hundred a month, is the, a decent wage or the average wage or some of the Latin American countries, if you can make a thousand or fifteen hundred on Amazon, you know, you could change your life in, in theory and, but for me and you, that's a side hustle that's not even going to pay, you know, much at all. So it depends on your goal. So if you're from one of those countries and you're, you just want to check, you could do that for less money. But if you're like from the west, you're gonna have to put some serious money in and be prepared to put more money in because it's a very cash intensive game. And what a lot of people sell is they sell this dream and they sell that. Yeah, buy it for 20 bucks, buy it for 2 bucks, sell it for 20, you got 18 profit. They leave out all the stuff in between.
- [11:20]
Steve Chu
Yep.
- [11:21]
Kevin King
And, and the margins are getting compressed like you said, with Amazon fees continuing to rise. And it's, it's squeezing the people who are not good operators and good at math, and it's squeezing a lot of people. And a lot of people are. You know, we had the gold rush of the aggregators.
- [11:38]
Steve Chu
Yeah.
- [11:39]
Kevin King
A lot of those guys that were around in 2014, 2015 that started selling Amazon, they cashed out for. For good multiples at the peak. And most of those guys, some of them retired, some of them tried to do it again. Most of them are failing because they don't have the skill set they were right place, right time. And the aggregator thing bombed as well. And so now it's more about. For me, Amazon should be not. It's a great place to launch and to prove something because the eyeballs are there. But it should not be your only focus. It should be maybe your first focus if that's the direction you want to go. But then you need to be a true brand. Trying to develop a true brand and not just looking for product opportunities. That was the old model is find a gap in the market, sell spatulas and sell radios and sell car chains and whatever else wherever there's an opportunity. I think that's much more difficult now. And you need to actually be building a true brand. And in your master plan, you need to get off Amazon. Amazon just needs to be the shopping cart of choice for some people, but you need to be D2C. You need to be Shopify. But that complicates it. Yeah, Tick tock Shop and Walmart and whatever. But that complicates it more because that's a whole different skill set. There's some overlap, but that's what, what bogs a lot of people down.
- [12:57]
Steve Chu
So I know you run an agency or you've helped a ton of sellers in the past. And I know for myself, people ask me, hey, I'm doing okay on Amazon, but I want to get off. Like, what do you tell these people on how to proceed with the DTC shop? Like a Shopify store? Because sometimes products don't even match. Right?
- [13:19]
Kevin King
Yeah, I mean, I, I don't have an agency, but. But when people want to do that, I usually tell them if they started on Amazon, you before you go to ddc, you might want to go set up a Shopify store just to have some credibility. But really you should actually maximize Amazon first, if that's where you started. So go to expand to Canada and then, then consider expanding to maybe Europe. But that's a whole nother animal with, I mean, you understand the systems, but you Got to have a whole other set of inventory and a whole nother set of logistics that go with that and a few other things. If you're going to go D2C the difference between the two that most people understand is on Amazon the traffic is there. You're just maximizing the traffic. You're just like how do I, you got a, it's like a freeway of people driving by at 60 miles an hour with the credit, the window roll down, the credit card out and all you got to do is stand in the right spot and swipe as they go by. If you know how to do that, you can win on Amazon, on ddc, that's, it's a whole different thing. You got to drive the traffic. Either you got to have a list or you gotta know how to run meta ads or tick tock, shop or, or email cold emails or whatever, whatever the flavor of choice is and drive that traffic. There, there are, there's advantages to both ways. I mean D2C, you control the whole customer experience with Shopify you have all the, the plugins where you can modify it and you can do a lot of cool stuff that you just can't do and you can do upsells and you can do, you know, retarget abandoned carts and all kinds of stuff and control the look and feel a lot more and get the customer data. But you can't, but you can't do most of that on Amazon. So it, they're two different animals. And I think a lot of people don't understand that when they, they go I tried Shopify, it didn't work. It's like well what did you do? Well, I put up a site and, and so much. Well, what'd you do to drive traffic? I don't know. I sent a couple emails. You know that that's, they're two different things. Yeah, I think, I think you know, if you have the money and the capacity, if you know how to drive traffic or someone's on your team to drive traffic. I think what I would do right now if I was just brand new and starting is I would start D2C if you know how to drive the traffic because and then have a pop up or something and let Amazon be the over, overfill drive that traffic and that awareness yourself either on TikTok, shop with UGC creators or, or by whatever means you want by other kinds of ads and then let them come to Shopify, let them experience it in the way that you want them to experience and you control the messaging, throw the whole, the whole experience there. And if they still, if they don't trust you, that's okay. You have a pop up or you even have an option, buy this on, you know, buy with prime or buy this on Amazon. Let them go where they trust it and go over there. And that's I think how I would approach it. And I would approach it as like let's build a brand, not just a little store or a little thing. And like you like what you do with the linens and stuff is I would be looking if at all possible trying to get into recurring sales of something where there's the chance of a repeat order. It's not just a one time. I'm going to buy a ladder for the house and I only need one ladder every 20 years.
- [16:29]
Steve Chu
Yeah, I mean I know you talk with a lot. I mean you interview a heck of a lot of people every week and then you have the billion dollar seller summit. What are some of the more popular strategies that either you're implementing or that you're seeing other people implement right now in the space?
- [16:43]
Kevin King
Probably the most popular silver shiny object right now is TikTok Shop for a lot of people.
- [16:48]
Steve Chu
Okay.
- [16:49]
Kevin King
And TikTok Shop can be really good but it's not as easy as what a lot of people think. And everybody thinks that they could just, they want to hire an agency or hired UGC person, they're gonna go viral. And there's a lot more, a lot more to it. But what I'm seeing right now in the whole E commerce space in general is a mix where the, the savvy people are on top of three things. They're on top of marketplaces and that could be Shopify has a marketplace where they tie stuff together. I mean so it could be marketplaces, it's social commerce and AI. Those three, if you could, if you can get your head around those three and how to inter, inter mingle those three modalities together, I think you have a really good chance of winning going forward. And I think that's where people should be be looking at right now. And if they're going to sell E.
- [17:41]
Steve Chu
Commerce, let's peel back the onion here real quick on TikTok Shop. Like can you just give an example of what someone's doing? What type of products work well that you've heard or have experience with Tick Tock Shop?
- [17:52]
Kevin King
I mean yeah, the, the ex electronic products can work well. Little gadgets and stuff can work well and beauty products work exceptionally well. Some supplement stuff work, works really well. I know A woman, we've had her on the podcast, she's doing $21 million a year selling pants for women on TikTok shop.
- [18:13]
Steve Chu
Okay.
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Kevin King
And I know someone else that's doing artwork stuff and doing like 6 million on TikTok shop. And then you know, they get the halo effect of some of that spills over to Amazon because not Everybody buys on TikTok shop. But the thing about TikTok shop is, is it's, I've bought stuff on TikTok shop and it's brilliantly integrated. So you're just sitting there watching. They know who to target. They know based on your history, based on other people and they, they will just pop something in and you can scroll right on by. But if you look at it, it's really easy to add to cart. Buy it in a matter of 5 or 10 seconds and then continue scrolling and there's no interruption, almost really in it. And so it's impulse buys things. So you're not going to sell a $10,000 thing on there. It's going to be very difficult. But for top of funnel and for an impulse buy, you know, sub $100 items, those can do very, very well on their pet items can do very well as well. So there's a handful of categories but those would be the ones that are probably, I'm probably seeing people doing the best with.
- [19:19]
Steve Chu
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of if you are interested in starting your own online store. I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained@mywifequitterjob.com free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I'll send.
- [19:51]
You the course right away.
- [19:52]
Once again, that's mywifequitterjob.com free.
- [19:56]
Now back to the show. What I like about TikTok shop is I actually just recently started actually being a customer on there. The video continues to play actually while you're all checking out. So it literally is really seamless and, and that's why I think it's just doing really well.
- [20:13]
Kevin King
I mean if you put in perspective though, what I always like to tell people is people always like get their eyes real big when they hear TikTok shop. I'm gonna go crush it there. It's great, don't get me wrong, but it's I think their total GMV last year, it depends on who. There's different reports that come out but somewhere between 50 and 20 billion was their GMV which is, that's not chump change but that's a weekend for Amazon. You know, during one of their sales Amazon was 700 billion when you add the 1p and 3b together. 1p and 3p not b together. So that it's, it's still extremely small but. And I know they've been having some troubles. You know they gave away the farm, free shipping and all kinds of promo discounts and everything for a while just to get people in and now they're tightening that up and they just did a big layoff recently. They just replaced a lot of executives from the US with Chinese based executives because like you guys are, you know, we gotta actually make money now. We can't keep bleeding money. There's some changes going on and who knows what's going to happen with, with Trump keeps extending the ban and who knows what's going to happen there. That may just be status quo or there may be an algorithm shift if someone buys it and that, that could affect things too. But social commerce is not going away.
- [21:34]
Steve Chu
You know it's funny, I actually just got on a meeting with TEMU recently and you know, because they're struggling because of the Trump changes and they're, they're trying to recruit sellers in the United States. First of all, do you know anyone who's selling on TEEMU successfully? Just curious.
- [21:51]
Kevin King
One person I knew that there was, they were selling sinks like, like construction stuff. Like. Yeah, like big heavy duty sinks and stuff. But no, that's the only one. And they're doing a lot of drop shipping that and this was about a year ago but other than that. No, that's not a Chinese based seller. I've heard of nobody doing from the US from the west doing well on, on team. And not to say that someone's not. But TEEMU is having. Yeah, they've lost. You know they're like the number one or number two app for a long time that's way down. Now they've lost. What did I just see recently like 60, 70% of their sales because they.
- [22:30]
Steve Chu
Lost 50 of their traffic.
- [22:31]
Kevin King
The de minimis rule. Yeah, yeah, right.
- [22:34]
Steve Chu
Yeah, right after that. Yeah. So I was just curious.
- [22:37]
Kevin King
Having similar problems too for the same, some of the same reasons plus some other reasons.
- [22:42]
Steve Chu
Yeah. So TEMU is trying to attract sellers by saying that there's no fees, but once you get into like the nitty gritty, you don't even get to set your own price. They set the price.
- [22:54]
Kevin King
Yeah. No, when they, they, I had a meeting with them in Seattle during. They, they did a little restaurant party pop up right next to the convention center. When Amazon was doing their big event last year in Seattle called Accelerate, I went on and talked to him. The guy was exactly that. He's like, hey look, we get all these sellers, they'll come over and this business development guy is like, we have no fees. I'm like, well explain this to me. And it's exactly what you said. Yeah, well, we set the price, we, we tell you we're going to pay you this and then we decide what we're going to sell it for. I was like, nobody's going to come from Amazon because they'll lose their buy box.
- [23:25]
Steve Chu
Yes.
- [23:25]
Kevin King
As soon as, as soon as you do that, they're going to lose their buy box. He's like, no, no, we, we have this and that and dude, you're gonna have, it's not gonna work. It's, it's simply not gonna work. You'll get a few naive people, but that's about it. Or desperate people, but. And I think they're, they're having trouble with that.
- [23:45]
Steve Chu
Unless Amazon gets busted for all this, I mean that's like anti competitive activity if I've ever. It's like blatant, right?
- [23:52]
Kevin King
Yeah. Oh, Amazon does things until they're forced to change. I mean back seven, eight years ago there was a big industry of buying, buying stolen data from China from people inside Amazon at China so we could get, you know, reports on what's working on PPC for your competitors or what's their back end keywords and all this. And people are paying good money for this black market stuff. And then Amazon got threatened and they're like, ah, we better start actually giving people a little bit more data so it doesn't look like we're just using this all for ourselves. So they have the SQP now Search Query Performance Report and they have Opportunity Explorer and they have a lot more tools and a lot more, they're much more loose with the data. But they won't make that change until it looks like they're gonna get in trouble. And the same thing happened with taxes. If you remember, they weren't collecting salary.
- [24:40]
Steve Chu
Yep.
- [24:41]
Kevin King
And then they, they went after, states were starting to go after sellers and then that got changed. So this Thing with the pricing, I think it'll eventually there's gonna be a, it'll come down where that changes. But I know like right now and what they do is Buy with. A lot of people don't know this. If you have the Buy with Prime on your site, you won't get penalized. So if you, on your Shopify site, if you have Buy with Prime as an option and Amazon comes and, and pings your scrapes your Amazon or your Shopify site and sees that you're selling it for $5 less than you are on Amazon, they're not supposed to actually penalize you on Amazon. That's, that's straight from someone at the Buy with Prime team. That's not something I read somewhere or some forum that's straight from one of the top people on the team that she told me that it was in my newsletter a while back. But that's the only workaround I know on that right now.
- [25:36]
Steve Chu
Yeah, well, I mean with Buy the Prime you're giving them all your information anyway, so I guess throw you a bone, not penalize you.
- [25:43]
Yeah.
- [25:46]
Okay. Let's talk about AI because I mean that's, that's the hottest topic at least that I've been spending most of my energy on. What are some pretty cool ways that people are using AI for E commerce that you know of?
- [25:58]
Kevin King
Well, a lot of people. Oh, here's, here's my take on AI and E commerce is you got a lot of people that have played with chat, GBT or played with some AI stuff. But I think most sellers are just touching the surface.
- [26:12]
Steve Chu
Yep.
- [26:12]
Kevin King
They're, they're barely doing anything. They're having it write an email, rewrite an email or a marketing email or they're having it maybe analyze one of their PPC reports or something fairly basic or help them write to try to get a bad review taken off. That's like fundamental kindergarten stuff for, for what AI can actually do. Most people don't understand where this is, how fast this is moving and where it's going. And I think a lot of E commerce sellers are going to be caught with their pants down. And I believe that there's sellers on Amazon now doing 5 million a year that two years from now are going to be doing 5,500 thousand a year and going what the heck happened? Because people that are using AI are going to have such massive AI correctly have such massive competitive advantages and if someone in their category starts doing that, they're going to crush them. And so AI and agent agentic AI is I think where it's at right now. And a lot of people like well, what's agentic AI? AI is where you can have automate things. It's an advanced form of automation where you have specialized. So here's an example. So if I want to, if I want to hire a PPC agency, I can go out and hire one of the top agencies in the Amazon space. There's about 800 of them that do PPC. Literally about 800. I have a list of them all. And people always say what's the best PPC agency to use? Kevin? It's like, I don't know, it depends on the person you get this person at Clairads, if you get the right person, you're going to rock and roll. But if you get employee number 27, you know they're still learning and they may mess up some stuff. So someone gets, goes in, they get employee number 27 and they're like ah, clear ads just doesn't work. This other guy offered it cheaper over here. I'm just going to bounce over here. And what happens is people end up bouncing from agency to agency, agency. What if you could take that number one guy, clear ads, it's crushing it for his handful of clients and basically duplicate him in an agent, everything he knows, dump it into an agent, its own little LLM and have him then manage an account. But he's getting data from other agents. So you have a series of agents. You have a PPC agent that's basically a mirror of this stud PPC guy. You have another agent that's a mirror of a sourcing person. Another agent is a mirror of a image creation listing creator. Another one that's a good keyword researcher. Another one's a good trend. And each one of those say specialized and they're the best of the best and they've been trained and coached up by, by real people to actually know what they're doing. And then they, they take the AI and the vast knowledge out there and then these things all talk to each other in a way right now they can't really, they can't really think on their own, completely think on their own, but it's going to get to the point where they can. So there still needs to be a human in this loop. But you could take what maybe took 20 or 30 people or a month to do and now do it in hours with one human and a bunch of agents. And by layering these agents together and having them talk to each other, they can execute 24, 7365 days a year that no one, no human's ever going to be able to do and, and can do complicated math and a lot of stuff that where if you overlay different components together, you overlay the PPC and you overlay the. Some of these big data. If you look at a company like pattern that has massive amounts of data points and lay all these data points, you can really hone in on what you got to do to a minute level to actually get that little extra CTR or to see what's trending. And I think it's going to get to the point where if you see there's good agents that are monitoring Tik Tok and they see that, I don't know, baby, at the time of this recording, you know, just a couple weeks ago, these little baby photos of baby videos were very popular. People are taking, like me and you.
- [29:57]
Steve Chu
Yeah.
- [29:57]
Kevin King
Putting baby faces on and doing little things and they could see something like that as hot. Then the agent, there's a video creation agent, uses me, VO3 or one of these other tools. It could come in and actually do that on the fly for me and you and actually have something out in hours to take advantage of that trend and ride that wave. That kind of stuff is going to happen. You're going to have stuff where they see someone's. Oh yeah, they're all, they're all talking about some new cooking thing. It's going to see that and it's going to be able to talk to the sourcing agent, the sources agent, through mcp, which is a way that agents can talk to each other. There's a couple different modalities in this, but it's a kind of a common language. It's a kind of like a translator where they can talk to each other. So you're going to have a sourcing agent. It's going to talk to Alibaba source and say, hey, we need to make a spatula or whatever. And which factories can do this with this kind of handle and this kind of thing. Because this is what people are complaining about, all behind the scenes without human. And you're gonna have factories. It's gonna come back say, well, these three can do it. Oh, here's a rendering of it. AI is making a rendering and then the human looks at it and goes, oh, yep, I like that, I like that. Nope, let's change this a little bit. Makes a couple prompt tweaks and then you have it being manufactured almost instantly. And then you can do 3D printing. So where well, let's test this spatula. Okay, here's the CAD stuff, here's all the STP files, there's everything. Let's make 100 of them and test the market and we'll have this out in a week or you order it and just give us, you know, you put a 7 to 10 day delivery on there and then like holy cow, people love it. Now let's go to mass market on it and mass production on it. So I think you're going to see start seeing more and more of those kinds of things happen.
- [31:40]
Steve Chu
Yeah, I mean we're not quite there yet. I'm just curious, how are you using AI or some of the people that you know directly using AI at the current state it is right now?
- [31:50]
Kevin King
Well, you're starting to see like companies like Triple well use this agent stuff. So what I just talked about is not science fiction five years from now. It's happening now on a basic level by the most advanced people. Like Triple Whale is a perfect example with their Moby agents. They're doing this right now to, to not quite the exact I gave, but 70% of that. But the average seller is using it to help them create video content or ad content, to help them come with avatars, to help them come up with angles, positioning angles, you know, and test different positioning angles, that those are the most common that I'm seeing now. And then writing emails and customer service and trying to get rid of reviews. A lot of people have little chat bots where you can do that in the education space. I see this is something that I'll be, I'm doing, I'm doing at BDSC will have a hint of this. But where I see an education is, you know, if I go and I take the freedom, if you take the freedom ticket course from me, that's one course that was made for a mass audience. And maybe it's not particular for you, but I think it's going to get an education where I can take my content and maybe and mix that with. It could be with you, it could be with somebody else, or it could just be mine. And someone comes in says, oh, I want to sell this, I have this much money. Answers 4, 5, 6 questions and then the course is automatically recreated on the fly based on my knowledge base specifically for that person. And people don't want to do a 10 module course. They want quick wins, they want something fast. So it's like here the next three hours we'll teach you everything you know to do specifically what you want based on that knowledge base, I think you're going to start seeing that type of stuff happening. And I know a few people that are messing with that now. I mean Jason Flatlin, a lot of you may know, it's the goat of webinars. Like the best webinar guy in the world. He just finished a tool that writes webinars in his, his style, which is a really good style.
- [33:57]
Steve Chu
Okay.
- [33:57]
Kevin King
And he says it's actually writing better. He's not putting it out just yet. He's doing some beta testing with the beta testers. I know I'm a mastermind that he, he runs. They're like holy cow. And even Jason himself says this is doing better job than me writing. And he's the goat. So there, there's uses like that. There's a tool that I use called Copy Coders. It's from Genesis. It's a ten thousand dollar tool. I think he sells it sometimes for five. But this tool is got. What he's done is he's created his own basically LLM and he's gone. And he's taken all the greatest marketing minds and copywriters of all time, Ogilvy and all the guys back, you know, 100 years and dumped it into this database and then taught it. And so that I can go in there and he's got something called a prompt called click drivers. So I can go in there and I can just give it a link. I can give it a link to your website and it'll go, it'll go suck in all your website or I can give it a email that I've already written or I can give it just outline of here's kind of what I want to do. Hit a button and it instantly will write what's called a click drivers email with all the hooks, all the everything in it. It'll give you 20 different versions in about five seconds of the email depending on which angles and which positioning statements you want to do. And then you can mix and match them. The thing, I started using it for some of my advertisers on Billion Dollar Seller Summit, Million Dollar Sellers newsletter and on my emails that I send out. It's doubled and tripled my conversion rates. Interesting because it's so freaking powerful. So. And some people. Yeah, Kevin, I don't need some tool. I just use ChatGPT. It helps me do that. Yeah, Chat BT can definitely help you if you know how to prompt it. But this Guy's prompt is 19000 words. 19, 000 words prompt and it goes into PO to do it. And that's powerful. And so that I think that's the thing is most people, it's garbage in, garbage out. If you know how to prompt and you know how to write it, that's. You can get amazing stuff. But this is. I think you're gonna see more isolated cases where you can take your content, all your podcasts that you've done, all your trainings and everything that you've done, all your, all your seller summits and put that into a custom LLM that people then can query. That's isolated. It's just you. It's not polluted by stuff that's on the Internet that may or may not be true because there's people that espousing ways to do things, you know, different teach course guys and YouTube videos and whatever. That's actually doesn't work or it's outdated or whatever. And you can control that whole ecosystem. And so I think, I think you see a lot of that and that's happening right. Right now. I have something coming out in two weeks that does that on my content.
- [36:39]
Steve Chu
I tried to do that a year ago. I don't think it was ready to go back then because it still kept kind of hallucinating stuff and extrapolating stuff that I didn't say. Maybe it's a lot better now. Maybe I should revisit that.
- [36:51]
Kevin King
Yeah, I would, I would take a look at that. I'm. I have something launching in two weeks that has, I have two versions. One's a free version that has a. It's scaled back a little bit and the other one's a complete custom LLM with all my content, every podcast I've been on, everyone I've ever hosted, all my newsletters, all my BDSS content Freedom ticket for getting some whatever webinar I've done.
- [37:18]
Steve Chu
Yeah.
- [37:18]
Kevin King
And you can go in there and you can. It's. It's not just a, it's not a search engine where you just type in like tell me what. Where Steve, Steve talked about ppc. Oh, it's this episode. Go listen to it. It's not, it's not a directory like that. It's like what does Steve Chu think about? Blah, blah, blah. And if you're in there, it's going to pull it from it or what are the top three people think about this and who are they? And they'll pull it all from there. And it's. You're talking to it conversationally.
- [37:47]
Steve Chu
Nice. That copy coders tool, is it like a one time Fee or.
- [37:53]
Kevin King
I think it's an annual. I signed up for it in January, so I'm not a hundred percent sure. Okay. But it's worth every freaking penny.
- [38:01]
Steve Chu
Interesting. So the back end is probably one of the popular LLMs, right? He's just composed a really.
- [38:07]
Kevin King
Yeah, yeah, he's using Claude. Yeah, he uses Claude on the backside. But he's, he's got all these custom products. I mean, another example is a vsl. I have a buddy that's launching a. Some stuff and he, he hired this company, it's like 40 grand for this company to help him set everything up. And they have a VSL and they gave him the BSL to use to, to do some recruiting and stuff for people for the site. He's like, this is not bad. So he threw it in chat gbt, gave it some prompts, made it a little bit better because he kind of knows the audience a little bit better than the, the company agency does. And so he then he said, kevin, can you throw this through copy coders? I was like, yeah, sure. So I threw it through copy coders and we did a series of variations on it. And then he sent that to them, said, here, use this one instead of what you guys wrote. And the, the people, you know, the Filipino va. So like, oh, you sure you want to do that? We only have. I said like, my buddy Mark's like, yeah, nope, do it. And so they're like, okay. And then about two hours later, the owner of the company texts him and said, where the heck did you get this? He's like, oh, I told you, I know what I'm doing. You know, I've got some access to some special stuff. He's like, this is brilliant. You mind if we use this as a template ourself? And so it, that's the power if you know, you got to know where to go and know how to look. And that's. The dabblers don't know that with Lovable right now. You can do some amazing stuff with N8N and make. You can do some really cool stuff. But a lot of people are, they just, they're just playing and they're not actually using it as a tool. And the people that in E commerce that understand how to use it as a tool to save money, to save time, and it's not necessarily to like get rid of a bunch of people. I mean that's going to happen by default. There are going to be people losing their jobs, but those people hopefully could be retrained or they'll Just have to adapt into something else. But it should make the people that are on this, it should make you more, more productive.
- [40:02]
Steve Chu
Do you think there's that the future is a market of people who just create these prompts really well. Like where do you see the market going?
- [40:10]
Kevin King
I think we just had Jordan hall on the Marketing Misfits podcast a couple weeks ago and he's big time affiliate marketer, big in the, in the space, done, done very well. And I asked him what, what's going on here with AI and what do you, what do you, what's your take? And he said he thinks there's a two to three year window right here to make a lot of freaking money as an E commerce or an education or in anybody that's on the cutting edge of AI, but that the rate AI is changing, some of that advantage is going to go away because it's going to be easier and easier for the average Joe. Just hit a button and it does everything. But right now it's still mind blowing to the average person. You know, when you, when you talk about this copy coders and they see it like holy cow, it's mind blowing and they don't have access to it but they will down, down the road at a much cheaper price. So he, that and then he said, I said well what's going to happen to all these people? You know, there's always talk about people losing their jobs and all this. And he's like, I think, you know, in the future there's gonna probably be a universal income because it's just with robots and everything going on, it's going to be difficult for a lot of people to, to make a, a decent living. Quality of life might go up for people. But he said the ones that are going to make the money. And I, I had just been thinking of this the day before he said it are entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurs are sitting in the driver's seat of this. If you have an entrepreneur mindset or entrepreneur abilities, you can see these potentials and you can see this and you're willing to take these risks and you're willing to go out there. And he said, and I believe this too, that the entrepreneur mindset type of person is going to thrive in this new AI economy and going to, and going to, and it's going to put a distance between the worker bees and the entrepreneur types, more of a distance. And so that's why I tell everybody just start dabbling in AI just so you can understand the basics. I mean I'm not a coder I'm not a developer. I can't do this. But I understand the logic of it because when I was, you know, back in the 80s, when it was, you know, late. Yeah, this is the early 80s, when personal computers were just coming out, my parents spent like $4,000 to buy this, the Xerox computer. The Xerox, the copy company computer. And it was like 4,000 bucks. And it was little floppy drives, you know, it wouldn't do anything. A little basic screen. But one summer I taught myself how to do basic, basic computing language. And because of that, and I did some Pascal and a few things in college. But because of that I understand the logic and the way of thinking. And that's the problem that a lot of people have. And the prompting is they don't understand how to tell it what they want. And that's why photographers and creative people right now are like, they're not as worried. People are like, oh, you're a photographer, Aren't you gonna be worried about your jobs? Like, no. This is the most powerful tool ever. Now I can tell it, I want this, this F stop and this lighting and this lens and this and this. And it creates it beautifully right there. If I don't like it, hit a couple buttons. Does again. I don't have to go spend a hundred thousand dollars on a photo shoot and props and sets and deal with humans and all this. They're the people that are going to win. So if you know how to do that and you understand the logic of how to talk to it, that's the power. And that's going to be the power for E commerce people too, is for whatever your goals are in E commerce, knowing how to combine these things and how to talk to it to get the results that you want.
- [43:19]
Steve Chu
I was just having a conversation with the buddy the other day about the Shopify app store. Like I was going to give it two or three years until all those apps, which a lot of them don't do much, people can just hit a couple buttons and generate something that's very custom to their shop going forward.
- [43:36]
Kevin King
No, I think you'll be able to do that. I mean there's some tools. Wow. What I just see that actually does that right now. Was it, ah, there's somebody already kind of doing something similar to that where you just type in and. And it basically creates, I mean the, the basic apps you can do right now with Lovable and some of these other vibe coding things. You know, when it starts, you gotta tie it into databases like Supabase or you gotta start tying nad. I think it starts getting a little bit more complicated. But I just talked to someone yesterday that's using Lovable and Lovable for those that don't know is a vibe coding. It's a, where you just go in and instead of having to type in all the coding, you know, the programming side of things, you just tell it what you want. I want to create an app that looks like Airbnb and does this and this and does these things, but I want to change this. And in, in seconds or under a minute, it creates the entire thing and then gives you the code to take it to Chat GBT to create like graphics for the interface and all kinds of stuff. But she's like, you know what? I come from the, the background of coding so I understand how to talk to it. So she's conversationally telling me what to do, but she understands what to say. And once and when does it does one thing it's like no, it looks like you're missing, you know, the, whatever the comments here. Oh yeah, you're so right. Let me add those for you real quick. You know, so that's, that's the advantage and that's E commerce sellers. We know what works and what doesn't. If you've been doing this for a while, so use that knowledge of conversion rates and psychology and marketing and, and, and upsells and everything to actually get even massively better results. And the other thing I think on, on E commerce is I think you're going to start seeing a lot of people not going to Shopify first or not going to Amazon first. It's going to be going to the AI engines, you know, chat GPTs and Geminis and whatever emergence as the dominant. If there's another Google that comes out of this right now, it's Chat GPT is the dominant one. But they're going to be start searching in there and, and if you look at what Jazz Andrew Jassy said, just recently released a document to internal and basically say hey, generative AI is coming. We're going to embrace it. It's going to change everything. And so you're going to search is going to change and the way people discover products can change. And you just think about someone like Google or Chat GBT even or, and Amazon, they have massive data on you and, and they have mass. They can customize specifically to what you want. I mean TikTok is the pre. Is the early preview of this. Well, Tik Tok knows how to target you with what what are you most likely to buy on Tik Tok Shop? I mean you've seen probably.
- [46:15]
Steve Chu
A lot.
- [46:15]
Kevin King
Of stuff that's come through Tik Tok Shop on your scroll. You said you bought a few, that you're like, that looks cool. No, I don't have restraint. I'm not gonna buy that. But that looks cool. No, I already got enough stuff. The wife will get mad at me if I put this on the credit card. And you're also frugal so you'll be maybe. But you probably see a lot of stuff like man, that's kind of cool or that's kind of cool because they know how to target you. That's going to put on steroids when you put a whole bunch of big data that Amazon's been collecting on you for 20 something years and knows everything. Have you ever requested your what Amazon knows from you?
- [46:48]
Steve Chu
No, I haven't. No. Did you do that?
- [46:51]
Kevin King
Yeah, I did that like a year and a half ago. It's like 780 pages PDF.
- [46:57]
Steve Chu
Okay.
- [46:57]
Kevin King
There's every video I've ever watched on prime, where I paused it, where I, how much of it I watched. It was everything I've ever put in my cart, everything I ever bought. Took out everything I ever looked at, everything I ever listened to, how many times I listened to Taylor Swift, you know, song or whatever. Everything is in there and it's, it's eye opening what they got and that data is worth a lot. And they can use that now with AI to really highly customize the experience for people looking to buy any commerce.
- [47:26]
Steve Chu
Yeah, that is nuts, man. Yeah, I, I've been thinking a lot about this because people like, I think most of my colleagues have just been seeing traffic steadily decline line over the years and it's because people aren't doing research on Google anymore. They're getting all their information from chat or any LLM and then when they're ready to buy, they'll just google the brand name and then go to your site and buy it there or they go straight to Amazon. So you're right, I think.
- [47:56]
Kevin King
Or they still go to the store. I mean retail is not dead.
- [47:59]
Steve Chu
That's correct. They go to the store but they're not doing the research on websites anymore. Right, right, right. They're doing all the research and you might get like a branded search and then a click to your site for the purpose.
- [48:09]
Kevin King
I remember I was at the the Pattern Pattern. If you don't know patterns based in Salt Lake City, they're the number one seller on Amazon 1.8 billion with a B dollars per year. 16 data scientists working for them. Amazon comes to them sometimes when they got questions on logistics and stuff. And I remember the CEO was on stage talking about the power of AI right now. He's like, look, in my family, I've got six kids. Every time they turn 16, we offered to buy them a car, their first car. And we tell them like, hey, you might like a Toyota Corolla, you might like this. And we recommend a few cars that they, they might, they might like. And in the past they've always picked one of those and that's what we got from they said. But our youngest that just turned 16, when we told her what to we recommend for, she's like, oh, hold on, let me go ask, let me go ask. Chat gbt. So she goes to chat gbt and types in, I'm a 16 year old girl, I like this and like this, I like doing this with my friends and blah blah, blah blah. And it came back and said, well you, you should actually look at the Jeep, whatever Cherokee or whatever, whatever it was, this would be the perfect car. So she goes back to dad and says, I want a Jeep Cherokee, not what you recommend. She trusted that and that gave her the answer of what she wanted. That's. You're going to see more and more than that. That just illustrates your point of what you just said is it's already happening.
- [49:29]
Steve Chu
Yeah. Hey Kevin, I did want to get a chance to talk about some of the things that you're working on. Billion dollar seller summit. That's twice a year. Do you want to tell the audience what that's all about?
- [49:43]
Kevin King
Sure. I appreciate that. Yeah. So it's one time, it's virtual. So I do once a year virtually. Next one's coming up in August, August 19th to 21st. And it's not just. You see a lot of virtual summits and a lot of zoom calls and stuff. It's not a zoom. We use a platform that actually has like 3D renderings of the exhibit hall. It's like, it's like it has breakout rooms. It feels as close to being at a real conference as you can with just being at your desk. So it's not, it's very interactive. It's all done live, no pre recorded stuff. So that one's coming up and then I have one. The next in person event is going to be in Nashville in April of next year.
- [50:21]
Steve Chu
Nice.
- [50:22]
Kevin King
And I'm changing the model on that. It used to be a exclusively a high ticket event. So it's about $6,000 to and then plus your hotel and airfare. So you're making a pretty considerable investment to actually come. Last one was in Iceland. Before that Hawaii and Puerto Rico. But I'm changing the model in Nashville where there's going to be a height and element of it but it's going to be three grand instead of six grand and then there's going to be tickets as low as 497. And I'm actually hoping that, I'm hoping that you'll be out there because at the event I have a podcast row. So you, I have, you know if you go to the super bowl and you always see the super bowl there's always this media row. All the ESPNs and foxes and all these guys go and they, they interview all the celebrities and everything. So I've got 20 booths set aside for podcasters. It's totally free as a podcaster host or you can have my wife quit her job booth and you could manage as often or as little as you want and you can interview people while you're there at the show and create a lot of content. So I'm doing cool stuff like that and we make it on my events are an experience. They're not. It's not the same as let's just go in a call a conference hall and listen to some talks and maybe have appetizers at a mixer. We do full on experiences like in Iceland we went snowmobiling on glaciers and we went crazy do crazy stuff. In Hawaii we did an amazing race type of event with everybody competed for a whole day racing around the island in 28 different rental cars wearing like jerseys that sponsored jersey that look like F1 Hawaiian style shirts. And so we do a lot of cool stuff like that to make it a total experience and not just an event. So those billiondollar sellersummit.com is the. If you want to find out more about those.
- [52:02]
Steve Chu
Nice man. And then I know I really liked your newsletter also anyone listening to it, you should go sign up. It's. It's over@billiondollarsellersummit.com also. Right.
- [52:12]
Kevin King
You can get there or billion just go direct@billiondollarsellers.com yeah well Kevin, thanks a.
- [52:18]
Steve Chu
Lot for coming on the show man. This is a great conversation and it gave everyone a peek to what is coming in the next year or two. And it's happening fast.
- [52:28]
Kevin King
It's happening fast. So hold on. It's going to be a fun ride. It's an exciting time to be alive and exciting. Time to be in e commerce. It's cool man. I appreciate you having me on dude.
- [52:37]
Steve Chu
Thanks a lot man.
- [52:40]
Hope you enjoyed this episode. The e commerce landscape is changing quickly and every marketplace is squeezing both sellers and shoppers. For more information and resources, go to My wife quit her job.com episode 606 once again. Tickets to the Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellers summit.com if you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com and if you're interested in starting your own e commerce store, head on over to my wife quithherjob.com and sign up for my free 6 day mini course. Just type in your email and I'll.
- [53:19]
Send the course right away via email.