into the Google search field: “water flask.” In return, several rows of information are displayed, starting with Google’s Product Listing Ads (PLAs). The pay-per-click PLA program gives priority position to products for which retailers have paid top dollar to drive traffic to their websites. In this case, Amazon has two products featured, the Hydro Flask and S’well bottles. Google AdWords Ads are displayed next, both with links to Amazon. Additionally, and as a result of Amazon’s page-rank power, Amazon products also top the free organic search results, with links back to their website. Of the nine product links for this SRP, Amazon owns five of them. Wait a minute. Is this Google or Amazon? (see image on next page)
Amazon also has millions of affiliate publishers, digital display banners (virtual billboards), review sites, and a dozen new media stories each week, all driving traffic to their platform. When it comes to consumers searching for a product to buy, Amazon has it locked down. Amazon.com has always been about selling you products and making that purchase as frictionless as possible. Every update or iteration since its inception has cleared the buyer’s path of roadblocks. Their entire e-commerce ecosystem is built around making the path to purchase as smooth and fast as possible, and no other competitor comes close to matching that experience. How do they do it?
Thirty years of purchasing data gives Amazon a tremendous advantage—especially because they are competing on their own platform against Sellers who don’t have access to the same information. They’ve been able to translate decades of Seller data into a delivery system that is custom-fit for their customer, or any customer for that matter. As a result, Amazon enjoys a much higher purchase intent than other e-commerce retailers. It’s not unusual for conversion rates to go as high as 25% on Amazon, for example, while other e-commerce sites are typically thrilled to see rates of 2 to 3%. The folks at Amazon Advertising put it best when they said that Facebook knows what you like, Google knows what you search, but Amazon knows what you buy! To further this point, Amazon Sponsored Brands, formerly known as Headline Ads, get 42% more clicks and 3.5 times the conversions compared to Google PLA Ads.12 I see these numbers every day when assessing data for my clients. Amazon has stopped at nothing to satisfy its customers. In return, their customers are more comfortable buying their products on Amazon than from any other online retailer.
SUCCESS IN THE MARGINS
As formidable a competitor as Amazon is, with a greater number of products online than there are people in the United States, don’t let their dominance discourage you from listing your products on their platform. Here’s why. Of the 2.7 million U.S. Amazon Sellers, fewer than 7% are producing $100,000 or more in annual sales; which means 93% are treading water.
Instead of thrashing around with the bottom millions, hold your own against the Top Sellers by using strategies like ours to get to (and stay) on top. For nearly two decades, I have invested tens of thousands of hours picking and developing products to sell on Amazon. I have also created cool brands, all while negotiating an online platform that aims to eat me for lunch. The fierceness of this experience forced me to develop a battle-tested plan that has kept me in the game.
When I look back on the distance my brothers and I traveled on Amazon since we launched our first products in 2003, it honestly feels like we orbited the sun—with the scorch marks to prove it! Countless algorithm changes, platform updates, policy tweaks, and Buy Box refinements created a mess of headaches (and heartaches) over the years, while also teaching us to be responsive and poised for change. Hackers, counterfeiters, tricksters, and Amazon itself soured us at times, but they also hardened us to the realities of this savage landscape. As we navigated this unique ecosystem, we learned that the best way to survive was by following a motto I learned as a Marine: Improvise, Adapt, Overcome.
Graduating from the Amazon School of Hard Knocks, like boot camp, gave me the raw experience and fortitude necessary to succeed on the retail platform. It also forced me to work smart and create a process that is repeatable and dependable—even on a platform that is unpredictable and often contrary. Amazon is not for everybody. I get asked all the time about what it takes to become a Top Seller, and as much as I like to quantify stuff, defining the characteristics of the hundreds of Top Sellers I’ve met over the years is really tough. That said, I’m always on the lookout for patterns, and it’s hard to ignore some of the most recognizable traits of the people I’ve come to admire, both for their achievements and for the ways in which they’ve persevered on Amazon.
5 COMMON TRAITS OF AMAZON TOP SELLERS
1 1.They run the marathon; not the sprint
2 2.They don’t sweat the small stuff (and they press on)
3 3.They have a sense of style and they use it to build a great brand
4 4.They value metrics and enjoy tracking them (ad nauseam)
5 5.They are lifelong learners, who simply must keep learning to survive
OWN YOUR DESTINY
While hard work and perseverance are among the qualities of the Amazon Top Sellers I’ve known, it takes a whole lot more to be successful in today’s virtual marketplace. The sheer volume of competition, coupled with Amazon’s price-squeezing tactics, make it nearly impossible to prevail on attitude alone. Remember at the top of this chapter I said that the pace of growth at Amazon forced my brothers and me to rethink our entire approach to selling online? It’s true. Once Amazon started buying our products and selling them for less, all bets were off. The tireless work ethic we brought to the platform in 2003 was no longer enough to keep us on top.
Over the next decade, I concentrated on developing a winning formula. We wanted to do better than just make ends meet on Amazon, and with thousands of competitors pouring onto the platform every day, we knew we had to establish a reliable game plan. I became obsessed with our performance data, making incremental adjustments to every aspect of our selling and marketing processes, and measuring the results. Ironically, Amazon’s own customer feedback tools and limited metrics would come to feature prominently in my Seller’s Survival Guide. But the most dependable tactic? Branding. Today’s Third-Party Seller has the unique advantage of shaping their brand message and controlling the narrative about their products and services—far more than Amazon Retail and its 1P sellers. Brand-building is one area where Amazon and its minions fall short, and the steps for building an enduring twenty-first century brand are an integral part of what was to become The Amazon Jungle Seller’s Survival Guide. While my brothers and I understood how to create a cool brand, having created several of our own, it wasn’t until I met Rick Cesari, the pioneer of direct response television marketing, that my survival guide got a major upgrade.
I still remember like it was yesterday, sitting in the audience of an opening conference session led by Rick. It was the 2016 Prosper Show for Amazon Sellers, where thousands of Third-Party Sellers have access to dozens of leading solutions and industry experts, like Rick. In his captivating keynote presentation, Rick made a simple point, the gravity of which nearly floored me at the time: features tell, but benefits sell. Now Rick didn’t originate the phrase, but in the examples he shared with us that day, working with products like The Juiceman, Sonicare, OxiClean, and GoPro, Rick profoundly altered the way I marketed products going forward.
I mentioned in the introduction that I introduced myself to Rick after that presentation, where we discovered we lived in neighboring towns just east of Seattle. Our proximity nurtured a mutual friendship and weekly coffee meetings, where we exchanged strategies to boost sales and build brands. We made a
