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In this edition (shortcuts):
“Pest Control” for Your Gmail Inbox💥
The Shiny Object Syndrome 🤖
News and Events Worth Following

Who here dreads opening their inbox to a wall of "just 15 minutes?" pitches?

Same. So I built something that makes them vanish before I ever see them. And here is the twist: it does not run on Claude.

Let me back up.

Every morning, same story. Between the emails that actually matter (clients, my team, invoices) sat a pile of cold pitches from complete strangers.

"Worth a look?" "Can I grab 15 minutes?" Backlink spam. Lead-gen offers. Someone selling me ad inventory for a sports site I have nothing to do with.

None of it was relevant. All of it wanted a reply. And every one I even glanced at was time I did not get back.

The worst part? Replying, even to say "no thanks," just tells them you are a real, live human. That is the kick they want. So the pitches multiply.

Not a spam filter. Spam filters catch the obvious junk. This stuff is sneakier: personalized, polite, and technically "legitimate" sales outreach.

I wanted a little agent that would do what I would do if I had the time. Read each new email in my Primary tab. Decide, "is this a cold pitch from a stranger, or something real?" And quietly move the pitches into Promotions where I never have to think about them.

Move them. Not delete them. Big difference. (More on that in a second.)

So I built exactly that. I call it Pest Control.

If you read this newsletter, you know I basically live in Claude Code. But this job had a catch. It needs to run on its own, every day, without me sitting there watching.

For a scheduled, unattended job, my Claude setup would not stay logged in in the background. Google's Gemini command line did. So the piece that reads each email and makes the call runs quietly on Gemini, on a timer.

Lesson I keep relearning: use the tool that fits the job, not the tool you are loyal to.

Here is the part I care about most. An agent that moves your email around is terrifying if it gets it wrong. Bury one real client email and the whole thing is dead to you.

So I gave it three guardrails before it is allowed to touch anything:

🔶 It protects everyone I have ever emailed. On setup, it scans my own sent mail from the past year and builds an allowlist. If I have written to you, you are safe. Period.

🔶 It skips any conversation I am part of. If I have already replied in a thread, it leaves that thread alone. Real relationships never get swept.

🔶 When in doubt, it does nothing. Only a clear cold-sales pitch gets moved. Anything ambiguous (a podcast invite, someone who might actually know me) gets listed in a daily summary for me to eyeball. It never guesses.

That last one matters. The agent would rather leave a borderline email in my inbox than risk hiding something I needed.

When there was a safe way to unsubscribe, I wanted it to do that too. But carefully.

There are two kinds of unsubscribe. One is a one-click web link (safe, no human reads it on the other end). The other asks you to send an email to unsubscribe. That second one is a trap: replying confirms you are real, and usually gets you more mail, not less.

So Pest Control only ever uses the one-click web version. It never sends a reply. No kick, no confirmation, no "great, this inbox is active."

I pointed it at my last seven days as a test. Here is the real tally:

🔶 It moved 9 cold pitches from 7 different senders out of my Primary tab and into Promotions.

🔶 It safely unsubscribed from the 3 that had a one-click link. The rest it just filed away, silently.

🔶 It correctly left my accountant alone. (A dumber, keyword-only version would have flagged her. The guardrails caught it.)

And then one surprise that taught me something.

In some cases, I find emails valuable, just not at that moment. I did not want to unsubscribe and burn the relationship. I just wanted the clutter gone from my primary inbox.

So I added one more rule: move to Promotions, but never unsubscribe. Declutter without cutting anyone off. That little nuance is the difference between a blunt tool and one you actually trust.

Every move gets logged. If it ever files something wrong, one command puts that day's mail right back in Primary. Nothing is ever deleted. Nothing is lost.

That is the "fast with guardrails" idea I keep coming back to. Move quickly, automate aggressively, but always leave yourself an undo button.

Now it runs on a timer every evening and sends me a short digest: here is what I filed today, here is what I was unsure about. I skim it in ten seconds and move on with my morning.

Want a taste without any code? Gmail already does a lightweight version.

Find a repeat offender, open Gmail's filters, and set "from this sender" to skip the inbox and land in Promotions. Same idea, just manual and one sender at a time. Good enough to feel the relief.

The full agent (the part that reads and decides for you) is the upgrade. And because the brain runs on Gemini, you do not need a Claude subscription to use it.

Want it to build the whole thing for you? You do not need to know how to code. Paste this starting prompt into your AI of choice (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, whatever you have open) and go from there:

Start there, tell it which email account you use, and let it walk you through the setup.

Here is what I keep noticing. The tools that change your day are not always the flashy ones.

Nobody is going to be impressed that my inbox is quieter. But I get a little slice of my morning back, every single day, and I never feel that tiny jolt of "who is this person and what do they want from me."

That is the quiet advantage of building small agents for your own annoyances. Not one big dramatic win. A hundred tiny ones that add up while everyone else is still hitting archive.

So here is my question for you: what is the small, daily annoyance you would hand to an agent first?

Hit reply with "pest control" and I will send you the exact setup guide (the no-code version and the full Gemini build, both included). No Claude plan required.

Know anyone who wants to work with an agency that has AI and tech in their DNA and are pros at managing advertising and creatives for E-commerce? Forward them this newsletter and let them connect with us at [email protected].

Be honest. Every time a new model drops (GPT-5.6, Gemma, DeepSeek), you feel the itch to try it. But testing each one usually means a new account, a new API key, and a new little bill.

The fix has a name: a model aggregator (or AI gateway). One account that carries a whole shelf of models, so you reach any of them through a single door instead of a dozen.

The new option on my radar is Amazon Bedrock.

Claude, Llama, Gemma, OpenAI's GPT, Amazon's Nova, and dozens more, all pay-as-you-go. Want to line up three models on the same task? Pennies to find out which one wins.

Here is the honest breakdown:

🔶 The good: pay-as-you-go, zero subscription. Some models are almost free to run. Amazon's Nova Micro is around $0.03 per million input tokens. That is not a typo. For quick, high-volume jobs (classifying, tagging, sorting emails) it is close to free.

🔶 Also good: on-demand prices basically match what each provider charges directly, and batch jobs run at half price. So you are not paying a "convenience tax" to get everything under one roof.

🔶 The catch: it is an AWS product, so it feels like a developer tool, not a chat app. You make an account, request access to the models you want, and it is happiest when a script or an agent is calling it, not when you are typing into a box.

🔶 The surprise: the shelf is deeper than you would guess. When I looked, there were 51 models on it, from the full Claude line (Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5) to OpenAI's brand-new GPT-5.6, to a row of names you may not know yet (GLM 5, MiniMax, NVIDIA Nemotron). Yes, even OpenAI's models now sit right next to everyone else's, which was not true a few months ago.

About that rumor. You might have heard Claude is free on Bedrock is free for six months. I heard it too, could not find anything to back it up, and I have a call in to AWS to confirm this week. So do not count on free. The real story is better anyway: it is so cheap per use that for testing models, "free" barely moves the needle. (One honest note on the prices: Bedrock labels its own numbers "illustrative" and ties them to a single AWS region, so treat any figure you see as a ballpark, not a quote.)

Who it is for: anyone building little tools and agents (like my Pest Control sweeper from up top) who wants to try models without stacking five monthly subscriptions. If you only ever chat in a browser, keep your ChatGPT or Claude tab. But the moment you start automating, Bedrock is the cheap sandbox.

How to peek: create an AWS account, search "Bedrock" in the console, and request access to a model or two. That is the whole on-ramp.

My take? The win here is optionality. The "best" model changes every few weeks now, so not being locked into one is quietly worth more than picking the right one.

I have not run it yet, but it is high on my list. Hit reply with "bedrock" if you want me to test it and send back the setup.

I recently went live with Augustas from Orange Klik and we talked about how Alexa for Shopping is changing the conversational e-Commerce landscape. Have a listen to this information packed episode!

If you have spent more than five minutes in the Amazon world, you know Kevin King. He is one of the sharpest, most generous operators in the space, and his events have a reputation for being where serious sellers go to actually level up.

His next one is Market Masters 4, August 20 to 24 in Austin, Texas. And it is not a sit-in-a-ballroom conference.

It is a 3.5-day mastermind at an 18,000 square foot mansion on Lake Travis. The format is built around "hot seats": you put your real business in front of a room of experts and walk out with a plan, not a tote bag of pamphlets.

🔶 Built for e-commerce operators at every stage, from pre-revenue founders to teams running $200M-plus.
🔶 Seven 90-minute workshops on AI, content, PR, email, and more.
🔶 Nine hot seats and thirty audience seats, all meals included. It is intimate on purpose.

I am flagging it because it is genuinely good, and because I have a little something for you. Use code EX1000 for $1,000 off your seat.

If you have been meaning to get out of your own head about your business, this is the room to do it in. You can see the full lineup on the Market Masters page.

🔶 Catch me at the 7 Figure Seller Summit. On July 28 and 29 I am walking through 5 Claude skills you can use to run your PPC. It is 100% online and free to attend.

🔶 Salesforce's commerce agents just went live. Its Shopper, Buyer, and Merchant agents are now generally available and plug straight into ChatGPT, another sign that "AI does the shopping" is leaving the slide decks and actually shipping.

🔶 There is now a scorecard for AI shopping readiness. Digital Commerce 360 and ReFiBuy launched a quarterly ranking of how prepared the top 1,000 retailers are for agent-driven discovery, so "AI ready" just became something people measure out loud.

🔶 Amazon's AI shopping prompts are now a paid ad slot. Sponsored Products and Brands prompts exited beta, they bill under your existing CPC, and every campaign was auto-enrolled. Worth checking your Prompts tab if you have not looked.

🔶 AI already steers a fifth of online sales. AI influenced roughly 20% of global online sales last holiday season (about $262 billion), and retailers running their own shopping agents grew 59% faster than the ones sitting it out.

We hope you liked this edition of the AI for E-Commerce Newsletter! Hit reply and let us know what you think! Thank you for being a subscriber! Know anyone who might be interested to receive this newsletter? Share it with them and they will thank you for it! 😃 Ritu