Date: 9th of July 2026 Summary: Kevin King breaks down why a small "US Owned" flag badge on a main image wins on trust rather than patriotism, and why "US Owned" is legally safer than "Made in USA." He covers the shutdown of Amazon's Mechanical Turk and its black-hat ranking history, SPS Commerce's fire-sale of the Carbon6 seller-tools business, and fresh e-commerce stats and hot picks. Key Points Discussed: The flag test: in a five-way PickFu poll of 30 US Prime shoppers on a portable seat cushion, one image took 63% of first-choice votes — the winner carried a small "US Owned" corner flag, color swatches, and a weight-capacity badgeShoppers cited trust, quality, and safety — not patriotism — reading the flag as a signal of a real, accountable company versus a drop-shipperQuiet reads as trust, loud reads as suspicion: a hammered-in "Made in USA" or us-versus-them framing tested as "try hard" and "insincere""US Owned" is not "Made in USA" — the FTC requires "all or virtually all" domestic production for a Made in USA claim; match the claim to what you can defend, and test flag-on vs flag-off in your own category (hat tip Daniela Bolzmann's Social Proof newsletter)Marketing Misfits episode with Norm Farrar and Drew Littlejohns on the dark side of seven-figure e-commerce successStats: Asia's e-commerce lead growing to a projected $3.7T by 2029 (up 38%), North America to ~$1.6T (up 31%), Africa fastest at 70%The Turk is dead: Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk (closes to new customers July 30, 2026), the "artificial artificial intelligence" that powered research tools like early PickFu and a generation of black-hat search-find-buy, fake-review, and fake-journey ranking tricksWhy it's dying: AI now does the tasks cheaply, and a 2023 analysis found 33–46% of Turk workers were secretly using LLMsTitan AI (software tool of the day): strategy-plus-execution for Amazon with human approval on every move, trained on 10 years of operator dataCarbon6 fire sale: SPS Commerce sold the 3P Revenue Recovery business (e.g. Seller Investigators) for $9.5M after paying $210M 16 months earlier, booking a $20M loss — a cautionary tale on owning your tool-stack leverage Links Mentioned: Register for the 24 Hacks from the Billion Dollar Vault webinarDaniela Bolzmann's Social Proof newsletter — the Made in USA flag testMarketing Misfits episode with Norm Farrar and Drew LittlejohnsSubscribe to the Marketing Misfits newsletterTitan AI — the TLDR training Hot Picks: Post Office busting shippers for wrong weights and sizesNew Jersey third state to ban dynamic surveillance pricingOpenAI now generating ChatGPT image ads for advertisersGoogle testing YouTube shopping links in Southeast Asia Stump Bezos Answer: Adding prompts to Sponsored Brands lifts conversion by 6%. (Amazon says 20% of shoppers who interact with a sponsored prompt continue the conversation afterward.) Parting Shot: "The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle." — Steve Jobs Find us at BillionDollarSellers.comFollow me on Twitter and LinkedIn. See the full Billion Dollar Sellers Media Library Ask the Ecom Oracle your ecom questions (better than Chat GPT!)