Читать книгу The Amazon Jungle - Rick Cesari - Страница 9

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