Amazon is making a change users won’t like | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

Looking at Amazon’s (AMZN) dominance over the retail market today, it’s hard to believe that the retailer was once just an online bookstore founder Jeff Bezos cooked up in his garage in Bellevue, Washington.

That was back in 1994, when the internet itself was a vastly different space where people signed up for America Online and used Netscape and just had to live with the sound of dial up every time they logged on.

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31 years later, Amazon has made decades of changes in an ever-changing retail landscape and had admirably pivoted each time. It actually surpassed Walmart’s revenue for the first time this year, making $187.8 billion in Q1 while Walmart reported $180.5 billion.

Just because Amazon has been good at staying nimble as the landscape of the internet doesn’t mean every decision it makes is golden.

It gets a lot of refund and delivery complaints — more than 57,000, according to the Better Business Bureau — and while it tries to keep its customers more or less happy, that’s a big job when there are hundreds of millions of them.

Now Amazon is unveiling another change designed to help those who use it as a selling platform. But for those of us who use the platform to shop, it’s about to create a lot more clutter we didn’t ask for.

Of course, this is about AI

It seems that AI is being stuffed into everything from search results to Facebook comments these days, so if you guessed that Amazon is adding a new AI-powered feature to its website, you would be right.

The feature is new to its Ad Video Generator, which is a product the company released in 2024 to help sellers create ads to promote their products. It’s a free service that uses AI to generate video ads in roughly five minutes, rather than having to go through the process of editing videos themselves or paying a third party to create them.

The new AI video feature is currently available to North American sellers that have access to Sponsored Brands as product. Amazon says that its supporting “limited product categories” at this time and plans to expand to others soon.

So you can expect to see more videos stuffed into Amazon’s listings very soon, giving you just one more thing to scroll past that you didn’t need to see while you’re trying to make a simple purchase.

Amazon plans to show you more video.

Image source&colon; PATRICK T&period; FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

Amazon is trying to keep customers engaged

The threat of President Donald Trump’s tariffs has put a crunch on the retail sector, and companies like Walmart and Target have announced that they will have to raise their prices in order to offset their costs.

Amazon, however, seems unphased. CEO Andy Jassy said in a shareholder meeting in May that the company has seen no change in demand or “any meaningful average selling price increases,” citing the “diversity and the size of our marketplace” as the reason people continued to buy at their usual pace.

However, third party sellers on Amazon may be grappling with whether they can continue to operate their businesses, much less make fancy AI videos to promote their products.

Many sellers import their products from China, which is now subject to a 55% total tariff after recent negotiations. While it’s nowhere near as daunting as the 145% tariff being tossed around earlier this year, it’s still enough to kill the profits of some small business owners.