Post-Prime Day News: Amazon Security, AI Shopping, Walmart Updates, and the Profitability Test

This week’s Selling on Giants News and Updates moves beyond the Prime Day revenue headlines and focuses on what marketplace operators should do next.

Prime Day generated record online spending, but smaller baskets and value-focused purchasing made profitability more important than top-line growth. Consumers continued spending, but they concentrated more heavily on lower-priced essentials, beauty, supplements, grocery, and products they could easily justify buying.

For Amazon and Walmart sellers, the real question is not whether sales increased.

It is whether the event left the business stronger.

In this episode, Mr. Will covers:

• The post-Prime Day profitability test: Why sellers should review contribution margin by ASIN, TACoS, new-to-brand customers, inventory burn, organic ranking, Subscribe and Save growth, and repeat-purchase opportunities instead of celebrating revenue alone.
• Why record sales can hide weak economics: A strong promotional event can still damage profitability when discounts deepen, advertising costs rise, baskets shrink, and customers concentrate around lower-ticket products.
• Amazon Seller Central passkeys: Amazon is expanding passkey access across Seller Central, allowing sellers to authenticate through Face ID, fingerprints, or device PINs. The rollout is also a reminder to audit users, administrator access, agency permissions, and backup account owners.
• Amazon Business delivery requirements: Seller-fulfilled offers serving Amazon Business customers will need to meet a new Business Hour Delivery Rate standard. FBM sellers should review carrier selection, warehouse cutoffs, handling times, delivery settings, and shipping automation before enforcement begins.
• Why Amazon’s marketplace is becoming more professional: Third-party sellers still represent the majority of Amazon unit sales, but stricter compliance, higher advertising costs, stronger security requirements, and measurable fulfillment standards continue raising the barrier to entry.
• Prime Day advertising beyond Sponsored Products: Prime Day continued evolving into a full-funnel media event across Sponsored Brands, video, Amazon DSP, connected television, and external traffic. Sellers need to separate branded demand capture from real customer acquisition.
• AI shopping and machine-readable product data: Shopping assistants are becoming another interface between consumers and products. Titles, attributes, specifications, images, reviews, availability, pricing, and product feeds increasingly influence whether AI can understand and recommend a product.
• Walmart’s July integration deadline: Walmart is moving Solution Provider integrations toward OAuth two point oh. Sellers should confirm that feed tools, inventory platforms, ERP systems, agencies, and internal applications are prepared before existing access methods are retired.
• Walmart and Amazon race toward instant commerce: Flipkart Minutes and Amazon Now show how localized inventory and quick commerce are pushing delivery expectations from days toward minutes. The long-term advantage may come from better inventory placement, not simply better advertising.
• Target Plus and curated marketplace growth: Target continues expanding its invitation-only marketplace with established brands while maintaining a more selective operating model than Amazon or Walmart.
• North American trade uncertainty: The United States did not agree to renew the USMCA in its current form during the latest review. No immediate changes have occurred, but brands sourcing from Mexico or Canada should continue monitoring negotiations and modeling tariff exposure.

The bigger takeaway:

The market is not getting easier.

It is getting more operational.

The brands best positioned for the second half of the year will have cleaner account access, stronger profitability reporting, structured product data, reliable fulfillment, better inventory placement, and enough discipline to separate promotional revenue from durable growth.

Follow Selling on Giants for weekly operator-level breakdowns covering Amazon, Walmart, retail media, marketplace operations, AI commerce, supply chain strategy, and what platform updates actually mean for sellers.

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Transcript

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Welcome back to Selling on Giants. I'm your host, Mr. Will, and this week we are moving past the Prime Day headlines and into the part that actually matters. What did the event tell us about the consumer? What is Amazon changing next? And where do operators need to tighten the business before the second half of the year gets more expensive? Prime Day generated more than $26 billion in United States online spending across the four-day promotional window, growing more than 9% year over year. That is a strong result, but the basket data tells a more complicated story. Average order size and average household spending declined, while shoppers leaned toward lower price products, household essentials, beauty, supplements, grocery, and products they could easily justify buying. The consumer did not disappear, the consumer became more selective. That should change how brands evaluate the event. Your prime day review should not start and finish with revenue. It should start with contribution margin by ASIN. Then look at tacos, new to brand customers, inventory burn, organic rank movement, subscribe and save growth, repeat purchase potential, and whether the advertising created incremental demand or simply paid for customers who were already searching for the brand. A record sales day can still be a bad business day. If the discount was too aggressive, the CPCs were inflated, the basket was smaller, and the product cannot generate repeat purchases, the revenue headline may be hiding weak economics. The brands that truly won Prime Day are the brands that acquired valuable customers, protected their hero products, preserved inventory, and created enough organic lift to keep benefiting after the promotion ended. That post-event analysis needs to happen now, while the decisions and account behavior are still fresh. Identify the campaigns that generated incremental profit, not just attributed sales. Look for products that gained organic position. Review which offers protected margin and which ones trained customers to wait for discounts. Then document the lessons before everyone gets distracted by the next event. Prime Day is not the finish line. It is the first real stress test for the second half of the year. Amazon is also raising the operational standard again, starting with account security. Pass keys are being extended across Seller Central accounts during July and will become mandatory for some accounts later this year. Instead of relying on traditional passwords, users can authenticate with a fingerprint, facial recognition, a device PIN, or another device-based security method. This is not just a more convenient login. Seller Central controls your listings, inventory, advertising, brand registry access, financial disbursements, and user permissions. A compromised account can damage the entire business before the team understands what happened. Every seller should use this rollout as a reason to complete a broader access review. Remove former employees. Remove agencies and contractors that no longer need access. Review administrator permissions. Confirm there is more than one trusted backup administrator. Make sure access is assigned to individual users instead of shared through one master login. We see brands spend thousands of dollars protecting trademarks and almost no time reviewing who can access the account. That does not make sense. Account access is part of the business infrastructure, and security should be reviewed on a schedule instead of only after something goes wrong. Amazon is also tightening standards for seller-fulfilled Amazon business orders. Beginning September 30th, sellers will be expected to maintain a business hour delivery rate of at least 90%. If performance remains below the requirement after October 30th, seller-fulfilled offers may become ineligible for Amazon business customers. FBA offers are not affected. This matters because business customers have different receiving requirements than residential customers. A package that arrives after the office closes can create a failed delivery, an unattended shipment, or an operational problem for the buyer. Amazon wants the delivery promise to reflect the business customer's actual operating hours. Seller-fulfilled brands should review this metric now, not in September. Look at carrier performance, shipping cutoffs, handling times, warehouse schedules, and the services being used for business orders. Amazon recommends tools such as automated handling time, shipping settings automation, and buy shipping, but the tool is not the strategy. The strategy is making sure the promise matches what the warehouse and carrier can consistently execute. This fits a larger Amazon pattern. The marketplace is becoming more professional, not simply more crowded. Third-party sellers represented approximately 60% of paid units in the first quarter, down from 61% in the prior quarter and 62% before that. It was the second consecutive quarterly decline in third-party unit share. I would not interpret that as the end of third-party selling. Third-party sellers are still the foundation of Amazon's marketplace, but the easy entry period keeps fading. Advertising is more expensive, compliance is stricter, catalog standards are tighter, fulfillment performance is measured more aggressively, account security is becoming more sophisticated, the seller who could improvise through the week is competing against brands with teams, systems, automation, and cleaner data. That is good news for serious operators. Higher standards create more work, but they also remove some of the weaker competition. When the marketplace gets harder to operate, execution becomes a moat. The advertising side is changing too. Prime Day was not just a sponsored products event. Brands continued pushing budgets into sponsored brands: video, Amazon DSP, connected television, external traffic, and broader retail media because they understand that demand often needs to be created before the customer performs a high-intense search. Sponsored products remain the strongest demand capture placement on Amazon, but search should not have to carry the full account. If nearly all sales come from branded searches and customers who already know the product, the account may look efficient while the brand quietly stops acquiring new demand. The post-event review should separate branded demand from non-branded growth. Look at which upper funnel placements introduced customers to the brand, which videos improved consideration, and where search spending became overly dependent on terms the brand already owned. Strong ROAS on branded traffic can make a report look beautiful while the category share is moving in the wrong direction. This is also where AI shopping becomes relevant. The next battle in commerce is not only between Amazon, Walmart, Google, and Shopify, it is between the shopping assistants trying to become the interface between customers and products. Customers are increasingly asking for recommendations instead of searching with exact keywords, and the assistant needs structured product information to make those decisions. That means attributes, specifications, images, reviews, product taxonomy, availability, pricing, and feed quality are becoming more important. AI cannot recommend a product it does not understand. A keyword stuff title will not compensate for an incomplete catalog, poor imagery, conflicting product information, and weak reviews. The future of SEO is not abandoning keywords. It is making the product understandable to both humans and machines. This is the point where many brands become overwhelmed because every update seems to create another project. Security updates, delivery standards, advertising changes, AI discovery, catalog cleanup, fulfillment, compliance, inventory. The answer is not to chase everything at once. The answer is to decide what materially affects the business and build an operating plan around it. Bellovics has helped brands sell over $500 million on Amazon, and we are a verified ad partner. But the real value is not simply launching campaigns or responding to platform updates. It is turning marketplace complexity into a clear plan, then executing that plan across advertising, creative, catalog, and operations. If your team has plenty of data but still struggles to decide what deserves attention, visit Bellavix.com. Now let's move to Walmart because there is one immediate operational deadline that agencies, software providers, and sellers cannot ignore. Walmart is retiring the ability for approved solution providers to create new delegated access keys on July 30th. Existing keys will continue working temporarily, but they are scheduled to stop functioning on October 1st. Walmart is directing integrations toward OAuth 2.0 through the Walmart App Store. That means every seller should review the systems connected to Walmart Marketplace. Feed management tools, ERP platforms, inventory systems, order management software, agency integrations, and internal applications all need to be checked. Do not assume the software provider has handled it. Ask directly whether the integration has migrated and whether the Walmart account will need to reconnect through the App Store. This is the kind of update that gets ignored because it does not sound like a sales opportunity. Then an integration stops working, inventory stops syncing, orders fail to flow, or prices do not update correctly. Infrastructure only feels boring until it breaks. Walmart is also improving its seller tools through pricing insights, item diagnostics, and recommendation APIs. That tells us Walmart Marketplace is becoming a more serious enterprise platform. It is giving sellers and solution providers more data to identify catalog problems, improve pricing decisions, and manage larger assortments. The operational gap between Walmart and Amazon is narrowing. Walmart still has work to do, but the direction is obvious. Sellers that treat Walmart like a side project will increasingly compete against businesses treating it like a real marketplace channel. We can see that same ambition in India, where Walmart-owned Flipkart and Amazon are accelerating their quick commerce investments. Flipkart Minutes has expanded to roughly 1,000 local fulfillment locations, while Amazon is preparing to expand its ultra-fast Amazon Now service far beyond its current footprint. India is becoming a testing ground for what happens after two-day and same-day delivery. The next competitive question is whether inventory can be positioned close enough to customers that delivery is measured in minutes. Most United States marketplace sellers are not going to build dark stores, and they should not pretend they are Walmart. But the principle still matters. Inventory placement is becoming part of the customer experience. The product closest to demand is easier to deliver quickly, less expensive to move, and less likely to lose a sale because the promise is weak. The next major e-commerce advantage may not come from better targeting. It may come from having the right inventory in the right region before the customer asks for it. Retailers are also differentiating in different ways. Amazon competes through selection, convenience, advertising, and infrastructure. Walmart is investing in fulfillment, memberships, retail media, and marketplace technology. Target continues building Target Plus as a curated invitation-only marketplace, recently adding brands such as Forever 21, Clarks, Jansport, and HiSense. Target is not trying to become Amazon with a red logo. It is using curation as the strategy. The marketplace is designed around selected brands and products that fit the target customer experience. That creates a useful lesson for brands. Every marketplace should not receive the same assortment, the same offer, and the same operating strategy. Amazon rewards breadth and demand capture. Walmart increasingly rewards value, fulfillment, and infrastructure readiness. Target rewards retail readiness, strong content, brand fit, and a reliable customer experience. Marketplace expansion should not be a copy and paste exercise. Finally, North American trade is back on the operating agenda. The United States did not agree to renew the USMCA in its current form during the July 1st joint review. The agreement remains in effect, and there are no immediate new tariffs simply because the review did not produce renewal. Negotiations will continue with Canada and Mexico. The practical response is to monitor, not panic. Brands sourcing from Mexico or Canada should understand their country of origin exposure, review supplier options, and model how changes could affect landed cost. But no one should move production based on a headline before the rules actually change. The bigger lesson is that supply chain diversification is not a one-time project. Brands moved away from China and into Mexico, Vietnam, India, and other markets because they wanted stability. Now each region carries its own trade, compliance, labor, and logistics considerations. Diversification reduces concentration risk, but only when the brand actually understands the new risks it is taking on. When you connect the week together, the pattern is clear. Prime Day delivered record spending, but smaller baskets made profitability more important than the headline. Amazon is tightening account security and fulfillment standards while the marketplace becomes more professional. Advertising is expanding beyond search. AI shopping is making product data more strategic. Walmart is upgrading its integrations and pushing delivery expectations forward. Target is using curation to build a different kind of marketplace. Trade agreements and sourcing assumptions remain open to change. The market is not getting easier, it is getting more operational. That favors brands with clean access controls, accurate product data, reliable fulfillment, better inventory placement, diversified sourcing, and enough financial discipline to understand the difference between revenue and profitable growth. If this episode helped you focus on what matters, share it with someone on your team who is responsible for turning marketplace updates into action. And if you are getting value from selling on Giants, subscribe and leave a review so more operators can find the show. Mr. Will here, signing off from Selling on Giants. The second half of the year is underway, so let's execute like it.