Spooky Scary SmartScout is coming out of the crypt. 🦇 THIS THURSDAY, two days before Halloween, we’re hosting our first-ever webinar, and we’re digging up the TikTok Shop data: where sales are happening, which categories are winning, and where the open opportunities are for your brand. Swipe for the treat. Everyone who attends live gets 50% off SmartScout for 3 months. The deal only goes to live attendees, so the replay won’t get you the discount. Grab your spot through the link in bio. No tricks, just treats. na2.hubs.ly/H08yytJ0

No one owns the Magnesium gummies category. Which is crazy considering double the amount of search volume for magnesium is searching for a gummy. Instead of a strict revenue analysis of products on Amazon, I ran an ingredient-and-format analysis. Much more interesting, and it looks across many different product vectors. People search magnesium gummies 2x more than powder, and nobody owns the convenient format on Amazon yet. Running all this product data through AI, I'm seeing insights I didn't expect.

Well This is a Bit Heart Breaking... "America is decorating more and dressing up less." PwC says nearly 1 in 3 shoppers started Halloween buying in July or August. On Amazon, "halloween decorations" searches were up 72% in September versus last year, while "halloween costumes" searches fell 48%. Halloween 2026 has a plot twist Decor searches on Amazon are up 72% from last year. Costume searches? Nearly cut in half. So where did all the costume shoppers go? We found the subcategory that picked them up. Link In Bio

Selling costumes on Amazon taught me one thing. The more expensive the costume, the higher the return rate. Ouch! What's it like to be a top 10 Halloween Seller? Awesome. Is it the most profitable? No. The most fun? Oh yeah! Selling thousands of Harry Potter scarves and spider web decorations makes Amazon the most fun job I've had. It always surprised me to see demand double week over week. The trill of high margins and when to time your last sales. Then praying that someone will buy something on October 29th because if not... we get to carry that inventory into next year. You never know which costumes are going to sell out in days. It almost became like price wasn't a factor. We had a pricing mechanism that could raise prices based on predicted stock out dates and the price would go up and up and up and people keep buying. But... when November came around and we looked at the overall profitability. Costumes were the worst. This was a fast track to becoming a rental service. But look at the product in the image. I guarantee you the return rate is way better on this. And after a few years of chasing revenue, when we chased profit it started to look a lot more like selling accessories. Halloween accessories (decorations, side parts to a costume, etc...) then became my favorite category. No returns. Huge demand. Doing this for 6+ years gave me one scar. Return rates are killer for profitability. After digging in the numbers, it roughly came out that for every percentage of return rate hit your overall margin by an equal value. Because sometimes returns come back in sellable condition and sometimes the don't. Sometimes you pay the return FBA fee and sometimes you don't. Amazon is notoriously hard to see how returns impact profitability. You have to combine a few different reports and even then... you don't get it down to the penny without your warehouse operations also giving visibility. So... thinking about chasing a seasonal product? Look at the return rates. It can be the difference between a fun spooky halloween and a total horror show on November 1st.

We pulled the top “Halloween” products on TikTok Shop and #1 is… a leaf blower. 🍂 $891K in 30 days. Its listing says “Halloween gifts.” That’s the whole Halloween connection. #2 is Halloween dumpling squishies with 28K units sold, which honestly feels more on theme. Turns out sellers will put “Halloween” in any title they can. So which costume category is actually growing fastest this month? 👻 Link in bio.

Hot take: stop trying to drag your Amazon shoppers over to your website. 🛒 Swapped’s whole thesis is that people shop where they like to shop, so lean into it. Send your customers back to Amazon and the marketplace rewards you for it. And yeah, I’m 100% that customer. Had a Built Bar for lunch today. Do they have a website? Sure. Am I going there? Nope. Send me an Amazon coupon code and I’m done, done, done. Are you fighting your customers’ habits or feeding them? 👇 Full Podcast Live On YouTube

How many people actually scan the QR code on your Amazon packaging? 📦 We asked. The best scan rate our guest has seen is 35%. That’s roughly 1 in 3 Amazon buyers raising their hand and saying “ok fine, I’ll be YOUR customer now.” Brand affinity does a lot of the work (nobody scans the code on a product they don’t like). But there are 4 levers you control: 1️⃣ CTA 2️⃣ Color 3️⃣ Design 4️⃣ Placement Get all four working together and your scan rate climbs fast. What’s on your insert right now? 👇 Live On YouTube TODAY!

Everyone in the office loves your new Amazon video ad. Amazon doesn’t care. 🎬 Two things decide whether a video ad pays off: 1️⃣ Performance. When a video converts, Amazon rewards it with a lower CPC, and a lower CPC means better ROAS. 2️⃣ Fatigue. Amazon says even its best videos start dropping off within 3 to 4 weeks. Most sellers have no idea ad fatigue happens on Amazon. The fix is to keep refreshing, testing and optimizing on a schedule. A great-looking video that doesn’t deliver results is an expense. How fresh are your video ads?

"Hype Check." Three products from the trend lists, side by side. Beef tallow searches are down 62% from their peak. PDRN serum (the "salmon DNA" skincare) is down 75% from its peak but still 43× its January 2024 level. Hypochlorous spray is at an all-time high, up 65% from last year. Every trend list calls these three "hot." Amazon's search data disagrees about two of them Two are fading fast and one keeps hitting new highs. Want to spot the next one before it peaks?

Amazon has three shelves now. Most sellers are only stocking two. 🛒 Shelf 1: organic search Shelf 2: paid ads Shelf 3: Alexa When Amazon’s AI recommends a product, that’s a whole new placement, and it plays by its own rules. You can rank well organically, run ads, and still never show up on shelf 3. Want to know what gets you there?

We’ve never done this before, and we picked Halloween week to start. 🎃 Our first-ever webinar is happening Thursday, Oct 29. For 45 minutes we’re opening up the TikTok Shop data and following the sales to see where the money is moving, which categories are heating up, and where the openings are for sellers who move first. Who’s on the panel: Scott Needham, Founder of SmartScout Michael Radziszewski, Partnerships at SmartScout Michael White, a 7-figure TikTok Shop seller who’s been in the trenches It’s free to attend. Everyone who shows up gets 50% off SmartScout. 📅 Thursday, Oct 29 ⏰ 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET 🔗na2.hubs.ly/H08kkgM0 The only scary thing here is the opportunity you’d miss by skipping it. 👻

Alexa won’t recommend just any product. 👀 We looked at which listings Amazon’s AI was actually suggesting, and two signals kept showing up. 1️⃣ Rating. Every recommended product we saw sat at 4.4 stars or higher. 2️⃣ Sales velocity. When a listing showed a “1K+ bought in past month” badge, its odds of getting suggested went up a lot. So some products that don’t rank well organically still get picked by Alexa, because the AI cares about credibility signals as much as rank. Want to see where your listings stand?

Amazon will never hand you your competitor's sales report. Their inventory levels might tell you the story anyway. Stock going up, stock going down, stock suddenly gone. Every move says something about how they're selling and what they're planning for Q4. In this one: the basic trick everyone uses, then the tool that does it way faster. First, why inventory matters at all. Ready to read your competitors like a book? Watch the Full Video On YouTube. 👀

A giant shoe brand handed over one shoe that just wasn't moving. A total dog. The plan was basically "eh, throw it on TikTok Shop and see what happens." It's now their #1 women's bestseller. And a Hollywood star is repping it. What changed? The market told them what to say about the shoe. Want to find your brand's next sleeper hit? Watch The Full Podcast Live On YouTube. 👀

Want to know how much stock your competitor has? Add their product to your cart. Then keep adding. Amazon eventually caps you and tells you the max it'll sell. In this one it stopped at 31. Sounds like a clean inventory count, right? Not quite. There are a few ways that number can send you in the wrong direction, and if you're making Q4 calls off it, you'll want to know them. Watch the full video on YouTube to see real inventory data without the guesswork 👀

1,650 TikTok Shops do more revenue on TikTok than their brand on Amazon. That number caught my attention. At SmartScout, we analyzed 15,749 TikTok Shops and their connections to brands on Amazon. Here’s what we found: 1. 5,181 shops had connected Amazon brand revenue. 2. Amazon was bigger in 68.2% of those comparisons. 3. TikTok Shop was bigger in 31.8%. Average revenue across the connected group: Amazon: $1.52 million. TikTok Shop: $410,000. Amazon’s average was roughly 3.7 times TikTok’s. But almost one-third of the connected shops were doing more revenue on TikTok. It's hard to ignore TikTok Shop on ecommerce now. It's part of the story. A brand that looks small on Amazon could have a much larger business on TikTok Shop. And a successful TikTok shop with a small Amazon presence could be worth a closer look. Many brands still don't have a unified strategy. Their loss.

Brands selling on both Amazon and TikTok Shop are growing about 5x faster than brands that are only on Amazon. And it gets better. The more they sell on TikTok Shop, the faster their Amazon growth climbs. That's the halo effect, and the data backs it up. So which brands are riding it right now, and which categories are next? Podcast Out TOMORROW on YouTube! 👀

Your competitor's inventory count tells you more than their listing ever will. Deep stock heading into Q4? They're betting big. A thin position? Could be a reseller testing the waters, or a stockout waiting to happen (and a window for you). Track it over a month and you stop guessing. You see how they actually behave and what they're really selling. Want to see what your competitors are sitting on? Watch The Full Video Live On YouTube! 👀

Four of the top energy drinks on Amazon (Red Bull, Celsius, and the rest of the shelf) and they're moving price way more than you'd think. Prime Day deals. Subscribe and save. Coupons that quietly jump from $4 off to something a lot bigger. We tracked all of it in real time. See what we caught 👉 Watch Full Video On YT

Amazon was hammering them on price. Their vendor manager stopped answering the phone. That's usually the moment a brand decides it's time for a change. One founder made the jump, cut out the 3PL fees, cut out the Amazon fees, and now runs everything as one lean operation. His advice: crunch your own numbers first. If you're doing fine, keep doing what you're doing. If a pain point keeps showing up, it's worth a look. Hear the full story 👉 Full Episode Out Now on YOUTUBE