Three sellers on what Amazon’s growth playbook looks like when AI handles the foundation

If Day 1 of Amazon Accelerate was about working smarter, Day 2 was about growing bigger. Thousands of independent sellers returned to the main stage at the Seattle Convention Center on Thursday morning for the second general session, and the energy was different. The audience had spent Wednesday in breakout sessions and hands-on demos, testing the AI tools announced the morning before. They came back with questions about growth.

Mary Beth Westmoreland, the Amazon vice president who oversees the seller experience, opened by connecting the two days. “Yesterday, you saw Seller Assistant evolve into something that knows your business and works alongside you,” she told the audience. “Today is about what you do with that time.” She described a seller she met the day before who spends her mornings fixing listing errors and chasing inventory mismatches. “Now, she’s going to have Seller Assistant handle that,” Westmoreland said. “So, she can focus on what’s next for her customers.”

Then she framed what was coming. “Today is all about growth,” Westmoreland said. “And the three things that accelerate it: fast delivery speed, awesome selection, and great price.”

The numbers backed it up. Last year, the average U.S. seller in the Amazon store made more than $375,000 in annual sales, up roughly 30% year over year, and more than 75,000 sellers crossed a million dollars.

We caught up with Amazon sellers, AJ Dudon, Rebecca Quirk, and Mohammed Sam after the session. Dudon runs All-Fit Automotive, where his business has doubled every year since attending his first Accelerate. Quirk directs Amazon for Wallaroo Hat Company out of Boulder, Colorado. Sam founded Purifyou, an eco-friendly consumer goods brand that pulled out of Canada and Europe years ago after international compliance consumed his small team for months. All three were back for Day 2 with different priorities, but the same question.

Sam’s story is the one Amazon is trying to rewrite. Five or six years ago, Purifyou tried to sell in Europe and Canada. His team spent months on EPR regulations, shipping paperwork, addresses, and identity certification instead of focusing on the U.S. business. “It was too complicated,” he said. They pulled out of both.

Then earlier this year, Amazon invited him into a program where his FBA inventory in the U.S. would be transferred to Canada automatically, no separate shipments from the manufacturer, no additional setup beyond government registrations. The emotional beat was immediate. He’d been wishing for exactly this and then watched it announced on stage. “It was almost like I wanted to pitch the idea to the FBA directors, and it was already there,” he said.

Piyush Saraogi, vice president of Fulfillment by Amazon, Product Technology, announced what Amazon is calling “Global from Day One,” a vision where sellers build their product once, list it once, ship it once, and sell in every country where there’s demand. Amazon handles everything between the factory and the customer, everywhere in the world.

For this to work, Amazon said three things must be true. Selling tools have to work globally from one console, supply chain infrastructure has to be global from origin, and compliance can’t be a barrier.

For sellers already operating globally, Seller Central now manages all international stores from a single view. Listings, inventory, pricing, and compliance across countries, all in one place. A new tool called Sell Globally is already live for FBA sellers. It matches real customer demand signals around the world with a seller’s catalog and performance to show them where to expand next.

And once they decide to go, the infrastructure is there. Global Inventory Pool, launching this year, lets sellers hold one uncommitted pool of inventory at origin. The system watches demand signals across every connected store and routes products where they’re needed. No pre-committing stock to six countries. No guessing.

Sellers also heard compliance, the barrier that stops most small businesses from exporting, is being rebuilt from origin. An AI-powered intelligence layer handles testing and certification, starting with toys, where sellers are seeing up to 60% savings on compliance costs.

“The thing that jumped out to me is global expansion,” Dudon said. “It’s a daunting task. It can feel like starting a new business in each country, and Amazon is working hard to eliminate that feeling.” He already uses FBA for Canada and Mexico, and it’s been a strong additional sales avenue. But managing inventory across too many countries, managing cash flow, figuring out where to send stock, dealing with all the different regulations, that’s what’s held him back. “The fact that they can recommend where to have your products tested one time to then be compliant for all the countries is a very inviting option,” he said. “We currently don’t have the bandwidth to put one employee on global expansion. Most businesses don’t. Amazon is hitting the nail on the head of making global expansion more efficient, and profitable.”

Sam is cautious about cost. He plans to test small, send a little, watch what Amazon does with the inventory allocation, and then scale. His concern is practical. You can’t easily pull international inventory back to the U.S. if the math doesn’t work. But the direction is right, and he said he trusts Amazon to continue to work to get it right.

Quirk sees global through a different lens. As a UPF sun-hat brand, Wallaroo’s business is seasonal. She’s intrigued by using other geographies to offset that, focusing on the Southern Hemisphere when the Northern Hemisphere is in winter. The logistics planning tools and global distribution infrastructure announced on stage made that feel possible for the first time.

Shelley Salomon, vice president of Amazon Business, told the audience that more than 11 million organizations are shopping in the Amazon store right now, from corner stores and dentist offices to hospital systems, school districts, airlines, and Fortune 100 companies. “The majority of what they buy is sold by sellers like you,” she said.

The numbers are hard to ignore. Business customers place orders more than two and a half times larger than consumers, convert at three times the rate, and return 50% less. Salomon announced Amazon Business Deals, a new tool that lets sellers create exclusive incentives and volume-based pricing for business buyers, all managed inside Seller Central.

“I had early access to the new B2B deals a couple months ago,” Dudon said. “What I like is that it creates two layers of sales opportunities, business deals versus direct-to-consumer deals. Businesses prepare for a big event like Black Friday differently than the shopper does. So, if you’re running a sale for how a business is preparing for Black Friday, you’re going to run that sale earlier. I can generate a revenue spike before Black Friday, and I can also generate my revenue spike during Black Friday when I’m hitting the consumer.”

Sam sees B2B as one of his strongest growth channels. Business customers order more, return less, and are less price-sensitive. He’s watched business buyers purchase Purifyou products without even clipping the coupon because they just need the product for their business. “We really want to grow our B2B because it’s better for us,” he said. “What I heard today, has me excited about the opportunity.”

“The way Amazon is implementing AI into the overall dashboard is a game changer for any seller, big or small,” Dudon said. He’d been in Seller Assistant that morning, asking where the opportunities are to grow his revenue and what’s holding him back. “It gave me 50 line items calling out specific products,” he said. Since he identifies products by SKU, not ASIN, he simply asked it to show the data his way. “I said tell me the ASIN and SKU in SKU form, and it did, instantly. Instead of clicking through something, you just prompt it to show you a different way. That’s time saving.” Being able to prompt the tool to show data your way is the difference between a dashboard and a teammate.

Sam is already thinking about what to do with the time he’s getting back. “The time I used to spend managing compliance and logistics is time I can now spend finding our next product,” he said. “We went from reusable bags to glass bottles to food storage by following gaps in the market. Now with these tools handling more of the operational side, I can focus on where Purifyou goes next, whether that’s a new category, B2B or a new country.”

Quirk put it simply. “I’ve been doing this long enough to know when the tools catch up to the ambition,” she said. “Between the global infrastructure, the reporting, the AI, there’s more opportunity in front of us right now than at any point since we started selling in the Amazon store.”