The Amazon Jungle. Rick Cesari
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Название: The Amazon Jungle
Автор: Rick Cesari
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Маркетинг, PR, реклама
isbn: 9781631952814
isbn:
FOREWORD
Since Amazon launched its e-commerce marketplace 20 years ago, it has welcomed more than five million third-party sellers to its store, creating one of the largest consumer shopping destinations in the world. In the first few years of this marketplace concept, Amazon repeatedly refined its sales pitch to convince retailers and brands to add massive product selection to its nascent marketplace. By adding enough sellers that more than one would offer the same selection, Amazon kept on recruiting to increase the likelihood of price competition, and hence lower prices that would bring Amazon customers back to open their wallets over and over. Soon, Amazon added its Fulfillment by Amazon program, enabling many sellers with little to no logistics capabilities to turn over the responsibilities of inventory storage and order fulfillment to Amazon, all the while growing their individual seller businesses to become lean operators of multi-million-dollar-a-year businesses.
Such growth brings constant change: in the two decades that have followed, the dynamics on the marketplace have changed significantly. While there are still opportunities to land-grab sales revenue, most of the largest marketplace sellers achieve success by selling their own brands, or exclusively selling other companies’ brands. The importance of the brand name is less critical than the seller’s intimate knowledge of how the “Amazon sandbox” works, and what Amazon expects from each and every seller on the marketplace. Today, Amazon third-party sellers balance the opportunity to share in billions of dollars of annual sales, with the vicious levels of competition across millions of sellers (not all of whom are playing fairly or legally), compounded by opaqueness and contradiction of Amazon’s rather limited communication shared with sellers.
By the time I met Jason Boyce and his brothers in 2007, they were already selling millions of dollars from their own brands, constantly refining and making better than any existing national and international brands—a concept rarely seen back then on Amazon, but now used by tens of thousands of sellers that develop their own “born on Amazon” private-label brands to grab market share from better known brands. I thought Jason and his brothers were a little crazy to be going this route, but every pioneer must suffer through the ignorance of naïve onlookers. I am grateful that I learned from Jason early in my Amazon tenure so I could proselytize the beauty of private-label brands.
A few years later, Rick Cesari spoke at our Prosper Show to a room packed with Amazon private-label sellers, discussing his journey in launching several billion-dollar brands, leveraging television as his primary sales channel. For those in attendance, it was abundantly clear that the secret sauce for uncovering customers’ uncommunicated needs, and building brands to meet those needs had been perfected long before the birth of e-commerce by the man onstage!
The adventurous outdoorsman seeking to travel by boat down the 4,000-mile Amazon River will need to understand the full journey, knowledgeable of where the piranhas and bugs will disrupt it. If properly prepared to make the trip, and accepting of the full scope of constant challenges and disruptions, that trip down the river will be rewarding and well worth the time. Becoming a profitable, long-term seller on the Amazon marketplace offers similar personal and financial opportunity. But you will need a toolkit filled with vaccinations, plenty of bug spray, a map, a compass and the right food and water in order to be successful. For sellers of all levels of marketplace experience—The Amazon Jungle is that toolkit. I am delighted to recommend the book by Jason and Rick. Read it, dog-ear it, and stay the course.
James Thomson
Mercer Island, Washington
WHY I WROTE THIS
Every day thousands of Amazon Sellers have their small businesses disrupted because their accounts have been accidentally suspended or their listings erroneously removed. I hear about it every time I talk to an Amazon Seller, whether starting up on the platform or doing $30 million a year in sales. In the Amazon e-jungle, the hoops required to jump through to get a problem not-of-your-making resolved are tedious at best, with revenue losses escalating until a solution is reached—sometimes too late. Trust me. The fear is real.
I started selling on Amazon in the pioneering days of e-commerce, when it was a wide-open frontier and an Amazon representative was just a polite phone call away, eager to problem-solve and open to Seller feedback. My brothers and I originally sold other people’s products on the platform until Amazon started high-jacking our listings and offering the same products for less. We always expected some push-back from the company, and we were prepared to adapt, switching to products with unique UPC codes. But Amazon always counterpunched by purchasing these exclusives out from under us, after we’d gotten them favorably ranked for search results (of course). We recovered again, building our own private label business, where we dominated the coveted Buy Box, only to have Amazon use our data against us to replicate our best-selling items, then offering their knock-offs at prices as low as our cost.
At every turn, U.S. Third-Party (3P) Sellers are being run-through by Amazon, with the latest example of this found in their relentless pursuit of Chinese national factories. Under their “customer-obsessed” banner to drive down prices, Amazon is recruiting and abetting the same factories 3P Sellers have relied upon, while also stripping away the protective layer provided by these very same Sellers for things like quality-control and consumer product safety.
In Mr. Bezos’ preternatural drive to be everything to everyone, he is sacrificing more than just U.S. Third-Party Sellers and the local jobs they create. Amazon shortcuts to price-savings for consumers is removing the critical layers of protection between unsafe, counterfeit products and Amazon shoppers, without culpability. It’s the very same argument we hear from Facebook when they claim they are simply a platform with no responsibility to ensure that advertisements or news reports are fact-based. The broken line between Amazon and its Sellers seems to absolve Goliath, while making it nearly impossible for Sellers (and consumers) to seek recourse.
In a recent interview for national television, I was asked about the predicament of Third-Party Sellers. Specifically, the host wanted to know what I would say to Jeff Bezos if he were in the room. It was a tantalizing question for sure; something I hadn’t previously considered. In the context of the small recording studio, with bright lights amplifying the prickly question, it felt a lot more real—as if Mr. Bezos was in the room, ready for a debate.
As the second-largest employer in America, millions of people—on and off the Amazon.com platform—have benefited tremendously from what Jeff Bezos has built over the years. Mr. Bezos and his whip-smart teams have fostered the kind of creativity and innovation that offers consumers an extensive selection of choices at unbeatable prices delivered to your door in two days or less. Sellers, like me, have also thrived, despite the hardships, sharpening our entrepreneurial skills and applying our own version of ”customer-obsessed.”
Pleasantries aside, however, it is 3P Sellers who helped build the Amazon of today and upon whom Mr. Bezos and his company are bound in the future. Bezos alone did not build Amazon; rather, the massive selection and creativity of products and brands are the result of the millions of small entrepreneurs who launched their wares for sale on Amazon. com. I would tell Jeff Bezos that it is unfair and irresponsible to ignore the needs of 3P Sellers by repeatedly thrusting policy changes on them that can put them out of business overnight. I would argue that treating Third-Party Sellers like third-class citizens is not only unconscionable, it’s counterproductive to Amazon’s own customer-first ambitions because small business owners, and their customers, get screwed in the process. In fact, Amazon 3P Sellers are the largest group of customers of Amazon Services and should share in the benefits of that customer-first СКАЧАТЬ