🗞️ Claude Skills are Here!💥🚀

Forget custom GPTs. Forget copy-pasting your brand guidelines into every single chat or project.

Claude just gave its Pro users a secret weapon called Skills, and it fundamentally changes the game. This isn't just a new feature; it's the end of repetitive prompting and the rise of specialized, autonomous AI.

Find it under Capabilities → Skills, and turn it on. Now read on for the fun part…

What Exactly Is a Claude Skill?

A Skill is a permanent, self-activating module of specialized expertise that lives in your Claude account.

Once uploaded, it's always ready to jump in and apply its specific knowledge to any conversation, without you having to remind it or paste a single line of instructions! For example, the Tax consultant, the Marketing genius, the Compliance expert.

🎯 The Real-World Impact

Here’s the difference between temporary instructions and permanent expertise:

• Before Skills: You open a chat, paste the 40-page EU Compliance Checklist, paste your marketing copy, and ask: "Find the risks."

• With Skills: You open any chat and simply ask: "Review this new landing page for EU compliance risks."

The AI automatically recognizes the need, activates your pre-loaded GDPR/CCPA Compliance Skill, and instantly flags the issues against all your proprietary legal rules—without you entering a single instruction.

🔪 The Kill Shot: Why Skills is Better than Your Current Setup

If you're already a power user, you're probably asking: "How is this different from a Project with Instructions?"

It's about Scope and Automation.

The bottom line: Skills eliminate friction. They allow you to deploy a whole team of specialists—Compliance, SEO, Customer Service—all running in the background, ready to jump in without you asking.

🔓 Unlock the Power: Setup in 60 Seconds

Skills are not the default. You have to flip the switch:

1. Go to Settings →Capabilities.

2. Beneath the Experimental section, find Skills under Turn on Code execution and file creation. (It's required for the magic).

3. The Skills (Preview) option activates. Use the Upload Skill button to deploy your expertise.

⚙️ The Blueprint: Building Your E-commerce Specialist

A Skill is just a ZIP file containing a Skill.md document. The most critical part isn't the instructions; it's the metadata. This defines the AI's autonomous trigger.

Once the trigger is set, you load your detailed rules into the Markdown body: your specific legal statutes, internal checklists, and risk profiles. Upload the ZIP, and the expertise is live!

The best thing is, if you don’t know how to build a Skill file, just ask Claude to build some for you with some basic instructions!

The AI Video Wars: China's "Free" Waver 1.0 Model Puts US Subscriptions on Notice

The battle for the future of AI video is heating up, and ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, just dropped a bomb. They quietly released Waver 1.0, a powerful new AI video generator that is surprisingly free and open to the public.

This move immediately elevates the tech rivalry between the US and China from a competition over quality to a clash of core business strategies. Waver's zero-cost entry contrasts sharply with the pay-to-play models of major Western competitors:

Waver's free launch is a declaration that China is committed to the "reach wins" philosophy, putting massive pressure on the existing Western paywall models.

Waver 1.0: Why the Free Model is a Technical Beast

Launched in August 2025, Waver 1.0 is more than just a budget option; it's a technical powerhouse. The model is already challenging top-tier competitors, thanks to its focus on professional-grade filmmaking features:

• Cinematic Quality: It generates high-resolution 1080p video up to 10 seconds long, double the duration of many existing models.

• Narrative Control: Users can now execute multi-scene workflows within a single prompt, directing the AI to cut between different camera angles, like switching from an establishing shot to a close-up.

• Advanced Consistency: The model is highly praised for maintaining object shapes, realistic physics (think water splashes), and natural human anatomy throughout complex motion.

You can currently access Waver 1.0 on a variety of AI Video platforms like ArtAny.

The Competition Responds: Google's Veo 3.1 Upgrade

The market pressure from Waver was palpable. Google responded in October 2025 by launching Veo 3.1, an upgrade focused on enhancing creative control to maintain its paid user base:

• Granular Editing: Veo 3.1 added features like Object-Level Editing (inserting or removing specific items in a clip) and advanced frame transitions.

• Audio Leadership: Veo continues to be the leader in generating native, synchronized dialogue and sound effects alongside the video.

• Ingredients to Video: For e-Commerce brands, upload your product, a face and a scene and boom.

However, as ByteDance gives away high-quality tools for free, the Western strategy of "Monetize First" risks being irrelevant. Once creators establish their workflow with a powerful, zero-cost tool like Waver, it won't matter if the competitors are slightly better; the market shift will have already occurred.

The Real Fight: Reach vs. Revenue

This move highlights a fundamental strategic divergence between the U.S. and China for control of the future of AI.

The U.S. focuses on locking down high-value users early. China focuses on getting the tool into the hands of millions of creators first.

Why Reach Wins the War

When a high-quality, free tool enters the market, the shift is inevitable.

Once creators move their workflow to Waver, the network effect solidifies Bytedance’s control. It won't matter if competitors fine-tune a marginally better model next quarter. The user base—the real currency in AI—has already been claimed.

The market has shifted. Companies betting on paywalls and credit systems just got blindsided by a competitor who prioritizes global dominance over immediate revenue. The pressure on the subscription model is now immense.

The future of e-commerce requires scale and speed. PPC Ninja helps brands dominate the AI transition. We leverage AI to build stunning, high-converting images and video, efficiently scaling your content production across all channels (Amazon Ads, Social Media, Posts). Stop fighting for relevance. Reach out to [email protected] to explore how we can immediately upgrade your content and future-proof your listings.

We're all chasing AI adoption, but does that traffic actually pay? Early data from a massive new study offers a necessary reality check (and a glimpse into the future).

Juo Kaziukėnas flags key insights from research by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze, who analyzed 12 months of first-party data across 973 e-commerce sites and over $20 billion in revenue. They investigated how organic Large Language Model traffic (oLLM) performs compared to traditional channels (like paid search, affiliate, and direct).

The Data: AI Traffic Is Small and Soft

The study confirmed what many suspect: traffic referred from ChatGPT currently converts far worse than every traditional channel. For instance, the conversion likelihood from affiliate traffic is 86% higher than from ChatGPT.

Here are the critical takeaways from the study:

• It's a One-Horse Race: ChatGPT accounts for over 90% of all observed e-commerce sessions from LLM platforms. (You can safely ignore the others for now.)

• The Volume Problem: oLLM traffic is still tiny: about 200 times smaller than Google's organic search, accounting for less than 0.2% of all traffic in the dataset.

• The Quality Gap: People converting from ChatGPT are currently doing so at a lower rate than from nearly all other channels.

The Turnaround: Why This Is Only Temporary

The most important finding? The conversion rate gap is narrowing fast.

This data suggests that as users gain experience and trust with LLMs, they are becoming more likely to follow through on recommendations. This trend will be radically accelerated by two factors:

1. Trust Improves Behavior: As people learn to rely on AI for shopping research, their behavioral usage is shaping up to match traditional channels.

2. Instant Checkout: The introduction of native checkout features within platforms like ChatGPT (replacing the multi-step process with a single "Buy" button) is poised to provide a massive, immediate boost to conversion rates.

The conclusion is stark: Today’s LLM traffic is a trickle of low-converting users, but that is merely the testing phase. The platform usage is increasing, the user experience is improving, and the conversion rates are catching up. None of this will look the same in 12 months.

Read Juo’s article on Linkedin

I am representing Amazon Business at the Small Business Summit in Toronto this month. If you need a FREE ticket to attend in person, hit reply and I will send it across.

Yay, I am going live with Norm Farrar and Amazon Ads on Wednesday, October 22nd! Tune into our conversation on YouTube

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