📦 The Order : Weekly Roundup - Slope
Issue #247
Happy Sunday,
Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:
Chart of the Week #1: CPG Brands
Don Brett highlights the demand capture of major CPG brands on Amazon:
Chart of the Week #2: Ocean Freight
Wondering where freight costs have gone this year? Drewry’s world container index has the 40ft container at $2,182 this week:
AI News of the Week 🤖
Learnings from novels: Chakrabarty et al (2025) look at whether readers prefer AI or expert human writers.
The results? It doesn’t look good for the writer profession:
AI generated content is preferred over human expert written content (unless the readers knew that it was AI generated)
And cost wise? While we do not account for additional costs of human effort required to transform raw AI output into cohesive, publishable novel length prose, the median fine-tuning and inference cost of $81 per author represents a dramatic 99.7% reduction compared to typical professional writer compensation
🤖 Autopilot is built around the premise that SEO success on Amazon heavily is built on AI automation. Still haven’t try it out? Get your evaluation here and make Autopilot part of your January AI push.
Movers & Shakers 🙌
Slope: Startup backed by Altman, JPMorgan announces capital lending partnership with Amazon [CNBC]
Strategy ♟
How Amazon sellers are rethinking SEO for AI search [Modern Retail]
A look back at 2025, from tariffs to Target to Labubus [Modern Retail]
Instacart to pay $60 million to settle FTC claims it deceived shoppers [Reuters]
Events 🎤
CES, Las Vegas, Jan 6-9
NRF, New York, Jan 11-13
Shoptalk Luxe, Abu Dhabi, Jan 27-29
Prosper Show, Las Vegas, Mar 10-12
Shoptalk Spring, Las Vegas, Mar 24-26
Make this week count 🙌
Christian