This Issue's TLDR...

• How to determine the sales potential of #1 organic rank for a give keyword
• The latest Black Hat tactics
• It's OVER for Amazon sellers (maybe)

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SPONSOR Weaponized Compliance Most sellers treat unfair competition and Black Hat tactics like the weather: They shrug, and resign to the fact that it's out of their control. But here's the thing... ...It's...not. My good buddy Paul Rafelson has a service called Weaponized Compliance that uses the law, and specific escalation paths within Amazon, to take down Bad Actors or otherwise shine a light on their illegal, unethical, and unfair behavior. And...it works. If you have a competitor that you know to be consistently flouting the law (or Amazon policy), you should chat with Paul. It's time to start fighting back. ​ Get Your Free Consultation ​ P.S. - Mention "Best@Amazon" to skip to the front of the line.

"Is the juice worth the squeeze?"

That's one of those phrases I find myself repeating a lot these days.

Mainly, to brand owners looking to launch Product X, or to double-down on Product Y.

In making those decisions, what I ultimately want brand owners to focus on is Potential ROI of those decisions.

Expressed mathematically:

Juice divided by Squeeze

Now, I'm not going to talk about "Squeeze" (or, put differently: level of effort and capital) today.

Because that will vary according to you and your organizational capabilities.

Instead, I want to talk about "Juice".

Where "Juice" equals Revenue Potential on Amazon.

Now, there are a lot of basic methodologies for calculating Revenue Potential on Amazon.

Just search "Amazon Product Research" on YouTube and I'm sure you'll find hundreds of videos (most of which probably just point to Helium10 sales estimates, and call it a day).

That's not what I'm talking about, or want to show you here.

Rather, I want to show you how you can use Amazon first-party data to calculate the "Juice" associated with driving organic rank for a given search term on Amazon.

Stay with me here...

To start, I want to shout-out SmartScout founder and Amazon OG, Scott Needham, for posting this macro data, and inspiring this post.

So, here's the scenario:

You're organically ranked at the bottom of Page 1 for a given search term.

You know the search term is highly relevant to your product.

You feel confident that you can reach the top of Page 1.

And you know that that ranking push is going to require On-Amazon (e.g., PPC), or Off-Amazon (e.g., influencers), investment.

Here's the question though:

If you make that investment, are you going to see those dollars come back?

Well, here's how you estimate that:

STEP 1: Navigate to the Search Terms Report (i.e., the Brand Analytics report containing the data that Scott shared).

STEP 2: Filter for the search term that you're considering a ranking push. For illustrative purposes, we'll use "gift wrapping paper."

STEP 3: For "gift wrapping paper," you have (a) Click Share for the Top 3 ASINs and (b) Conversion Share for the Top 3 ASINs. The #1 ASIN had a Click Share of 4.21% and a Conversion Share of 2.19%.

STEP 4: Now, head over to the Search Query Performance report. Find the selected search term -- i.e., "gift wrapping paper" and take note of the Search Query Volume. For "gift wrapping paper" in December 2025, that volume was 358,155.

STEP 5: Next, head over to Product Opportunity Explorer and search for your search term. It will likely aggregate into a niche, but that's fine. Once you have the relevant niche, find the Search Conversion Rate. Depending on how volatile the Search Conversion Rate is, you might use the "Today" value, or you might construct some sort of average. Up to you.

STEP 6: Finally, you're going to take the data points in Steps 3-5, and combine with your Average Selling Price, as follows:

Search Query Volume x Search Conversion Rate x Conversion Share x x ASP = Sales Potential of #1 Rank on Search Term

OR, with our numbers from above:

358,155 x 5.42% x 2.19% x $20 = $8,502

That's your monthly sales potential if you can win, and hold, the #1 organic ranking for "gift wrapping paper."

Now, you know the "juice". Go forth and "squeeze"! (if it makes sense)

FRIENDS OF B@A SmartScout You want another cool SmartScout use case? Sure, don't mind if I do. Ever wonder what your competitor's has been historically? Of course you can see that in SmartScout, with the Scope function: Anyway, go subscribe to SmartScout and use it to spy on your competitors. ​ Use Code "Jon25" to Get 25% Off Your Subscription

BEST from the Group Chats

My good friend Chris McCabe (you might know him as eCommerce Chris) is sort of my "Watcher on the Wall" when it comes to emergent Black Hat tactics and Amazon enforcement activity.

He plays "fixer" for a lot of sellers, too.

He recently sent me some disturbing Black Hat tactics that seem to be proliferating.

Here's Example 1 (this is a message exchange with one of his clients):

And here's Example 2 (this is Chris describing the abuse pattern to me):

Stay vigilant out there, my friends.

BEST from X

Maybe I haven't pressure-tested Amazon's Seller Assistant enough, but I've mostly found it...rudimentary and unhelpful.

For example:

• It will point you to policy language rather than provide a clear interpretation and/or explanation.
• If you ask it to perform calculations around certain aspects of your business, it will tell you HOW to do it (in some cases) but it won't actually DO it.
• If you're trying to research the competition or the market, it will reply that it can't access market data and/or point you to another place in Seller Central like, e.g., Product Opportunity Explorer.

Not impressed.

Cajua @CajuaRobinson Why is no one talking about Amazon's internal AI "Seller Assistant"? It's ridiculously good and it has access to Amazon's internal data unlinke ChatGPT / Gemini / Claude etc. I gave it an ASIN and had it do competitor research. Produced some incredibly insightful data very 8:45 PM • Jan 15, 2026 1 Retweets 23 Likes Read 2 replies

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BEST from YouTube

This is an incredible video from my good friend, Adam "Heist" Runquist.

Well worth the ~20min time investment because...he's right.

This is an existential moment for Amazon sellers.

But, this time, it's not Us vs Us. It's Us vs the Machines.

As Adam puts it:

"This time we're not getting replaced by better sellers. We're getting replaced by machines that don't sleep, don't eat, don't doubt, and don't need us at all."

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