Why is no one talking about Alibaba's new AI agent platform?
It's made it ridiculous easy to find ideas, find trends, find suppliers, reach out to them and figure out if there's an opportunity for a multi-million dollar e-commerce business.
I'm a guy who's a software entrepreneur.
I stay away from e-commerce.
I know my lane.
But this new AI agent platform, it's called Axio by Alibaba. is getting me a little converted.
Now there's an opportunity for me to use something that makes it easy to start an e-commerce business.
And I love unfair advantages.
So this episode, if you stick to the end, you'll understand how to use Axio.
And you might be like me, interested in starting a multi-million dollar e-commerce business in 2026.
Enjoy the episode.
I've never been a huge e-commerce person, and a big reason for that is because it's been so hard to understand what to build, why to build it and how to build it.
Today we're going to go through Axios.
By the end of this episode, you will understand how to use it and maybe in 2026, building a really big e-commerce.
And even if you're like me and you're a software person or you're a boring business person and you've never created an e-commerce business, learning these tools is super helpful.
So I encourage you to stay to the end.
Let's get into it.
When you get to Axio, it's actually free.
And by the way, I have no...
I have no affiliation with Alibaba or this company.
I'm just a guy who likes to use products that give me an unfair advantage.
You can see that they've given you some examples of how to use the product.
For example, Spot Rising Trends.
It says, analyze current market trends in baby products and identify what is gaining traffic.
You can click here, view details.
It gives you an overview and it ties into Amazon Trends.
You can see here the search volume is in the blue and in the pink the sales count.
You can get that trend data anywhere.
What's really interesting is it gives you like actual products that are crushing it so it's like convertible cribs with green guard gold certification this is like a category i would never have thought of or multi-functionable functional convertible cribs with beds and smart features and by the way i have a baby so like i i should be thinking about this and i'm an idea guy so i should be thinking about this but i you know haven't so i think that you know This is why it's good to use this and it gives you more market insights.
Organic and natural products.
Smart baby products is a key differentiator.
Smart monitors, app-connected thermometers, automating feeding systems are gaining popularity.
Then you can go in a perplexity or whatever, go and actually check the sources.
It gives you the product recommendations.
It says, based on stable demand for electric nasal aspirators despite fluctuating surge volumes.
Enhancing features like suction power, temperature control, ease of cleaning.
It gives you these products, it shows what's working, and I think that's pretty cool.
But what I think is even more cool is that it could actually create product designs for.
So, for example, you can hear, since Squid Game Netflix 3 is popular right now, I want to design some products based on Squid Games.
Help me figure out what kind of products can sell well and generate product design image.
And then it goes and actually does a market analysis on it.
It shows okay, here's these costumes and masks, here's some guard costumes, Netflix player 456 jacket all these different things and it literally gives you product design concepts.
Is this something that is good to go and you can just say, okay, go make it?
I don't think so, but it's getting you the creative juices.
At least it's getting my creative juices flowing.
It puts all these product design concepts into visualizations.
Then what I think is most importantly, it actually gives you who you could to reach out to to go and build these things and what it's going to cost.
So you can see here, $6.71 for a hoodie.
And it's a verified manufacturer.
And if you click here, it says matches.
So why is it a match?
8 on N matches.
Well, because they do screen printing, they do embroidery.
And I think this is why it's cool that it's built in with Alibaba.
And by the way, it doesn't just integrate with Alibaba.
It integrates with other Alibaba Express and a few others.
So it gives you that data and then you can go ahead and just reach out to people.
Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy, and he is not wrong.
I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup.
And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so, too.
Now I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building.
So that's exactly why I built IdeaBrowser.com.
Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox, and it's all backed by me.
High quality data trends.
How we do it, people always ask.
We use AI agents to go and search.
What are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building?
And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out.
We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level.
Give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat GBT for ideas with it.
But you can start for free, ideabrowser.com.
And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it.
You can see here, it also gives you some insight around what's the margin potential.
So like hoodies, for example, the margin is two to 300%.
Maybe I want to do that, but oh no, maybe a phone case is three to 400%.
And it tells you the MOQ range, basically how many units, and then the wholesale price and the target retail price.
But it also says that you need to do licensing.
Why is this all really interesting?
It's giving you ideas.
It's basically like a partner for you.
Someone who's going and doing the analysis and I think it's I think it's super, super helpful.
Let's go through a few more, and then I'm also going to prompt it myself.
Let's go and see.
Here's a new feature that they come out with.
Help me identify product opportunity pain points in pet supplies that serve the senior dog's niche market.
You can see here, Here's the product opportunities, advanced orthopedic sleep solutions.
Would never have thought about this, right?
Uh, it says like have cooling gel integration for temperature regulation, low profiles for easy access.
Makes sense, right?
If you're a senior dog, um, you know, you want a low profile for easy access.
Uh, memory foam uh, technology.
I could see a product like this absolutely crushing it.
Cognitive simulation product.
So you know, senior dogs face cognitive decline.
This creates opportunities for interactive smart toys, treat dispensing, puzzle feeders, memory enhancing accessories, and then it literally, you know, mocks up uh, you know what it, what it could look like and like That's AI man.
I mean, yes, the STOM over there, I don't know what that means.
But it's interesting, right?
This looks like an interesting product and it is good fodder to start with.
And then from there you can iterate.
And you could iterate with other tools, by the way, like I've talked about on the channel, things like Nano Banana, etc.
So it gives you all the search volume.
It gives you the positive tags and negative tags.
So this is based on Amazon trends.
So you can see that there's washable pee pads for senior dogs and the average rating is 3.88.
So that's a bad rating, right?
So that means that there's an opportunity to create great products, and it's telling you why people aren't enjoying the products on Amazon.
This is so insightful.
I've talked about before how this is the age of the idea person, but it's also the age of the insight person.
You need these insights.
Thank you for having me.
So I love this, you know, joint health supplements.
It tells you exactly how many monthly searches, what the average rating is.
And then it gives you the hot selling market analysis, joint supplements.
You can see here retail price versus hotel price.
You know, for me this is some of the most helpful insights is when it actually tells you what the market opportunities are.
So it's telling you arthritis, hip dysplasia, all these things.
And then that helps me ideate for what type of product I want to create.
What's really cool about Axio is it helps me on the idea side, it helps me on the trend side and it helps me in terms of who I should reach out to.
Let's do one around sourcing.
Find manufacturers that offer high-quality facial cleansing brush with OEM service, private label available.
MOQ 500 with official certifications and strong reviews.
It literally is giving me all the different suppliers right here.
And then I can reach out to them through this product.
And you can see, okay, people are satisfied with this.
If you would have gone to Alibaba.com, it would have been way overwhelming.
You can see what the reorder rate of these things are.
So pretty darn cool.
I have some more prompts that I wanted to prompt in and I wanted to see how it would work.
So let's just try a couple of them.
I'm in the market for a mechanical keyboard and I've been getting a lot of ads for it and I think mechanical keyboards are being it's a trend.
That's gotten bigger over the last five, six years.
So I said, analyze mechanical keyboard and list the top 10 unmet customer pain points with proof from reviews forums, Amazon QA.
Cluster them by theme and rank, by urgency and willingness to pay.
So we're going to see if Axio could actually go and do that.
It says yeah, it's an agent task thinking through your request to create the most effective approach and detailed plan.
No worries.
So we start the agent task, and it really does feel like you're using something like a Manus.
It does feel agent-oriented.
When I use Manus.
It was the first product I ever used that it felt like It was agents, like the agent era was here.
And this does feel the same.
So it says it's gathering customer feedback on mechanical keyboards.
You can check its sources if you double click here.
And it says I will search for mechanical keyboard.
Customer reviews, forum discussions on Reddit and Geek Hack and common QA complaints to get user pain points.
So it works pretty quick.
It's been only a few seconds.
And it says I can now synthesize these into the top 10 pain points, cluster them and rank them as requested.
Think about what we're doing which is absolutely insane.
We've heard about a trend.
Either we just in life heard about a trend.
Maybe it's on Instagram, TikTok, ideabrowser.com.
And then we've gone and said, hey, we want to create a product in this space, basically.
But we need to understand the pain points best.
Because we don't want to be just coming up with ideas not based on data.
So we're getting the data.
And we're going to go and create something that has the highest likelihood of success.
For that reason,
So it comes up with a plan.
So I'll do one quick search specifically for willingness to pay and budget Keebs to better quantify that ranking factor.
One search to confirm the willingness to pay for specific features like the hall effect switches or premium stabilizers.
After that I will compete.
Wait, I should check if there's more specific data on willingness to pay for fixing these issues.
Users often mention I'd pay an extra X dollars for a feature.
I'll look for that specifically to fulfill the rank by willingness to pay requirement accurately.
This isn't just an AI agent platform.
This is a smart AI agent platform specifically designed with e-commerce in mind.
That would not happen on a lot of the other agent platforms, because I think that this just understands the e-commerce mindset.
It's now gone ahead and updated the plan.
It's done a final targeted search for willingness to pay.
It's completed the task.
Looks like we are almost done.
So let's see what we got.
So it's gone ahead and shown what the pain points are.
Key chatter, lack of hot swap in mainstream, bloated buggy software, poor wireless.
It doesn't really matter.
It just, you know...
It doesn't matter to us, really.
The point is because you guys are probably not working on a mechanical keyboard company.
But the point is, as someone who's in the I'm not in the mechanical keyboard business but in the market for mechanical keyboards, to me that makes sense that those are some of the key features.
It's gone and put it into a chart.
The double typing, the key chatter is the biggest, highest urgency complaint.
Lack of hotswap PCB, the most common source of buyer confusion or regrets.
Stabilizer rattle mushy keys, proprietary software bloat.
This is incredible.
Then it goes.
Would you like me to research specific brands that are successfully addressing these pain points, or perhaps analyze a different peripheral category?
Wow, that's a hard word to say sometimes.
I would say I'm looking to build a mechanical keyboard company for Gen Z women.
I really like the trend of cozy gaming.
I had actually seen an ad, a cozy gaming ad.
I think that's where the opportunity is.
So it's going to go ahead and research this trend cozy gaming, and then building mechanical keyboards for this particular audience.
And then, if I was to actually go and build this thing one, we need to find the suppliers and work with the suppliers, and we can do that on Axio.
But the second thing would be also...
Once I've built this thing, reaching out to all the different creators in this niche and getting them a part of it to help get distribution and stuff like that.
It's synthesizing the previous research to create a brand identity and cozy gaming product concept tailored for Gen Z women, including a preliminary product roadmap.
This includes a suggested brand name, CloudKey or Nook & Switch.
Actually not bad.
A mission statement focused on turning the desk into a sanctuary.
I absolutely love that.
And a product line, the Sanctuary Series, featuring tactile materials like ceramic coatings and thocky acoustics.
I also prioritize a three-phase product roadmap, starting with a flagship 75% wireless keyboard.
How good is this?
How good is this and why is no one talking about it?
Maybe they're not talking about it because it's Alibaba, China, and there's that whole thing.
Maybe they're not talking about it because they're just I don't know.
Maybe people just haven't heard of this.
Anyways, we've gotten some of the data here.
It gives the product concept, the sanctuary series.
They're calling the company CloudKey or Nook & Switch.
It tells you what the features are and it gives you the visual concepts.
That looks pretty cozy to me.
That looks pretty cozy.
Look how cool that is.
With a little mushroom there?
Are you kidding me?
That's awesome.
So I'm going to say okay, this looks great and all, but I need a trusted supplier from Alibaba or somewhere else to reach out to and create this and make it a reality.
Give me a list.
We're going to ask the agent to go and give us a list of it, identify and vet suppliers.
You used to have to either search endlessly on places like Alibaba and other sketchy marketplaces.
You don't have to do that now.
You can just ask the agent to do it.
It's going to rank it by the ones that it thinks is going to be best.
And then that's when you actually have to do some of the hard work of vetting these people.
Just because they say it's 47 or people had a good experience, doesn't mean you're going to have a good experience.
So please, please do call these people.
Make sure that you feel good about them as well.
And get to know them.
Buy 50 units in the beginning.
Don't buy 5,000.
But the point is, why aren't we using this?
This just makes me want to start an e-commerce company in 2026.
And I can't even believe I'm saying that.
Because the reason I wouldn't start an e-commerce company is because it's just hard to do.
But with things like this, it makes it a lot easier.
So it's still working on the task, but it's giving me some notable suppliers.
Like you can see this Shengzhu Demolin Electronic Technology, which supplies brands like Leobog Wobkei Um, so it's going to go ahead and do that.
It gives a short list summary.
It says, you know, the Zangzu is the number one, the most aligned partner cause they're building.
So I guess some of the bigger, uh, competitors, but let's see.
Okay.
So it's going to go, so it's made, uh, it's given me four.
Um, and it's given me, like mid-range, high volume, so it's telling me why It's great.
How do I outreach?
When you reach out to these suppliers, I recommend starting with three critical technical verifications.
The ceramic finish rather than the anodization.
The sound profile confirm they can support a five-layer internal dampening structure to achieve the thocky rain sound signature and the color matching.
Verify if they can match the PVT keycap plastic color to the CNC case color for seamless, monochromic aesthetic.
Would you like me to draft a professional inquiry email you can send to these suppliers?
Or should I research cozy influencers for your launch partnership?
That's a bit too ahead right now, but I'm going to say, yeah, you can... draft, and inquiry email.
Also, I was wondering, is there any suppliers on Alibaba that I can reach out to too?
These don't seem like they are on Alibaba or another or similar website.
So let's see what that says.
But what's cool about this platform is it seems like it works, right?
A lot of times you're working on a new LLM or a new product and it goes a bit wonky.
But I'm impressed.
I'm impressed here.
Verify supplier platforms and search for additional options.
It's going and doing that.
This will be our last thing that we'll ask, but I'm just curious.
These suppliers are indeed on Alibaba.
Wow.
Hi, I'm looking to...
I'm looking for a high-end manufacturing partner for our upcoming Gen Z-focused brand, CloudKey.
Specifications.
It puts it all out there, so I don't have to do anything.
The customization, delivery terms.
It gives you the top verified Alibaba suppliers.
And then it says, strategic outreach recommendations.
Don't ask for matte paint.
Specifically ask for e-coating.
These are the things that like.
Why I wouldn't go and start a new e-commerce product company is for these little things that I would never have asked.
I feel like I would just get rinsed.
Rinsed, rinsed, rinsed if I started an e-commerce company for these reasons.
But with something like Axio, you know, I just feel more confident.
And then it gives you a whole document of all the different people I could be reaching out to with a checklist and technical questions.
And I can even press the send inquiry button direct from Axio.
All right.
This is really cool.
There you have it, folks.
My tour of Alibaba's new and really cool e-commerce LLM called Axio.
No affiliation, but I think it's cool.
It's got me thinking about e-commerce startup ideas in 2026.
I hope you enjoyed this.
If you did, please drop a like, a comment, share it with a friend.
So I know that I should be doing more of these Startup Idea podcast episodes.
And should I be doing more e-commerce stuff?
Is that interesting to you or should I stick to my lane of just software?
Or do you like me to spice it up here and there?
Thanks everyone and I'll see you next time.
