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4. This Week in M&A Issue #189

This Week in M&A Issue #189

Hello, sugar!

Today’s trend of the week is “breadmaking”.

Breadmaking is back. As per the latest data from Shopify, shared with Retail Brew, breadmaker orders rose a whopping 533% in May, with cookware, pizza pans, and even pastry dough seeing major spikes. It’s like 2020 all over again, minus the flour shortages and Tiger King.

Rising food prices are driving cost-conscious consumers to bake at home, where a loaf of sourdough can cost under $2, far cheaper than the $10 artisanal options at markets.

For online business owners, there’s dough to be made, literally and figuratively. Whether it’s selling baking tools, starter kits, or digital products like recipes and breadmaking courses, the demand is hot.

Today we have for you:

• Amazon is quietly deleting billions of products from its store
• The untapped goldmine of storage cleaner apps

And:

• New Amazon AI tool lets sellers make video ads in minutes
• Why many business buyers fail after the deal closes
• How Google’s auto translations could be costing you traffic

Alright, let’s dive in.

Amazon

Amazon is quietly overhauling its massive online catalog through a secretive project called “Bend the Curve,” aiming to eliminate billions of underperforming product listings.

With an estimated 75 billion product listings currently live, the platform has become bloated with inactive SKUs, duplicate ASINs, spammy entries, and abandoned third-party listings. This clutter is making it harder for customers to find relevant, high-quality products, and Amazon is taking action.

Internal documents obtained by Business Insider reveal that Amazon planned to cut at least 24 billion ASINs by the end of 2024. These include listings for items that don’t sell, are outdated, or have no actual inventory.

The goal isn’t to limit selection, but to improve quality and cut costs. Listings with no inventory, poor performance, or missing information are being flagged and removed. Internally, the project is also saving Amazon money, over $22 million in AWS server costs in 2024, with $36 million in additional savings projected for 2025.

While Amazon built its reputation as “The Everything Store”, the company is shifting toward a more curated and accurate product catalog. But reducing clutter without losing valuable selection is a delicate balancing act. Amazon data shows a steady decline in public perception of its product variety, from 84% of surveyed shoppers calling it the best in 2022 to just 68% in 2024.

Amazon has also started limiting some sellers. A new “creation throttling” policy blocks sellers with large, inactive catalogs from adding new listings. In 2024 alone, more than 110 million new product listings were prevented, and thousands of sellers received warnings.

For sellers, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. Those with clean, high-quality listings could see better visibility and sales. But sellers with outdated or neglected catalogs may face removals or penalties.

Now is the time to audit listings, remove inactive SKUs, update product details, and follow Amazon’s quality standards to stay competitive.

YouTube

How to Avoid Stalling Your Business After You Buy It

Most buyers make this one big mistake after acquiring a business… and it’s costing them millions.

They close the deal, take over a profitable company, and then? Nothing. For months.

Even in high-level M&A deals, businesses stall out because buyers are too scared to make a move. They don’t want to break what’s already working.

But here’s the truth: the first 100 days after an acquisition is your biggest window of opportunity.

In this video, Greg breaks down exactly how to hit the ground running with a proven 100-day post-acquisition plan, so you don’t just maintain your new business… you grow it.

Watch now to avoid the costly mistakes most buyers make.

Apps

Looking for a profitable app business to start? Try storage cleaner apps.

These apps help users free up space by deleting duplicate or unnecessary photos and videos, compressing files, and sometimes offering extra features like ad blockers. According to data from Appfigures, users spent nearly $40 million on these apps in the last month alone.

There are around 1,500 storage cleaning apps across both the App Store and Google Play, but over 95% of the revenue comes from Apple’s ecosystem. That’s because most Android phones already include basic cleaning tools, while iPhones do not, creating a strong market for third-party apps on iOS.

This mirrors the earlier boom in QR code scanner apps, another niche where iOS lagged behind Android in native functionality, allowing third-party apps to thrive.

In May alone, 161 cleaner apps earned over $1,000, 42 made more than $100K, and 7 crossed the $1 million mark. Top earners like Cleanup, Cleaner Guru, AI Cleaner, and Swipewipe made a combined $197 million in 2024 so far and are on track to double that in 2025.

Success in this space depends heavily on visibility. The highest-earning apps run large Apple Search Ads campaigns targeting thousands of keywords. They also rank well organically by using keyword-rich names like “Cleaner” and “Phone Cleaner” to show up in more searches.

With low brand loyalty and similar-looking icons, users often download the first app they see. Developers who can crack visibility through smart marketing and App Store Optimization may find themselves tapping into a surprisingly massive market.

While Apple could one day add these features natively, for now, iOS users are clearly willing to pay. If you’re a developer, this niche offers a proven, high-revenue opportunity, especially if you can stand out in a crowded field.

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Amazon

Amazon Ads has officially launched its enhanced AI-powered Video Generator tool, now available to all U.S. advertisers.

Originally introduced in beta in September 2024, the tool has evolved significantly over nine months, making it easier than ever for businesses, especially small and mid-sized brands, to create high-quality, professional-looking video ads with minimal effort and cost.

The tool makes short, eight-second video ads, called “low-motion” videos, that use simple animations or camera effects. Unlike traditional video creation, Amazon’s tool taps into product detail pages, customer reviews, and uploaded assets like logos or social media content to automatically generate customized, brand-aligned videos. Sellers can also upload their own videos, and the tool will automatically pick out the best parts to create new ad clips.

This launch is especially helpful for small businesses that don’t have big marketing budgets or professional design teams. According to Amazon, 50% of the products advertised with AI-generated videos are being promoted for the first time. These tools are making it easier for sellers to advertise without needing advanced technical skills. Amazon data shows that video ads in sponsored brand campaigns get 30% more clicks on average, showing how effective this format can be.

However, concerns remain. Although AI-generated ads undergo the same moderation process as other Amazon content, Amazon’s automated systems have previously struggled to catch counterfeit and banned items.

Even with some limitations, like not yet supporting longer, story-driven videos, the new tool offers sellers a new way to stand out without needing a large creative team or budget.

Google Search

According to a recent Ahrefs blog post, Google has started automatically translating English-language web pages and displaying them in other languages directly on Google-owned subdomains like translate .goog. This means users see the content without ever visiting the original website, cutting off publishers from valuable traffic, analytics, and revenue.

The trend accelerated after Google’s March 2024 Core Update, which expanded AI Overviews into 200+ countries and over 40 languages. When local-language content isn’t available or deemed low quality, Google uses its own machine translation to serve up results, sometimes in AI Overviews, featured snippets, or standard search listings. The translated content appears on Google’s proxy servers, not the publisher’s actual domain, and all internal links keep users within that proxy environment.

To see if your content is affected, check Search Appearance → Translated Pages in Google Search Console or search for your domain in Ahrefs under translate .google .com. You can also look for unusual traffic from “translate .google .com” in GA4 referral data.

To counter this, you can create your own localized versions, even short ones, of key pages. Adding hreflang tags helps Google recognize the correct version and often removes the proxy version from search results within days. If localization isn’t possible, blocking auto-translation with the X-Robots-Tag is another option.

The key takeaway: don’t wait for Google to decide how your content should appear internationally, take the lead and localize it yourself.