Is Your Company Ready for the Amazon Purge?
Written by Michael Stephens
An article on Bloomberg told of a scary potential future for a lot of small companies that sell to Amazon directly - Amazon will stop buying from them all together. Our sources say that any company doing under $10,000,000 in sales per year will be relegated to selling on the third-party marketplace by the end of the year. 

Is your company ready? 

The main issue facing a lot of smaller companies is having to learn a new platform and doing it on their own. There is no information on wether Amazon will provide any additional training other than what is currently available in Seller University. With over 80 different videos, most of which don't give you very detailed information, it can feel overwhelming. 

There is so much to learn that it can take months for an individual to actually consume all that Seller Central can do. And to do it well, it can take even longer. Depending on what access an account has, there can be over 50 separate modules that you can navigate to from the home page, and they all do something different.

In addition to just navigating the website, companies will have to figure out strategy and systems to put into place including:

Updating existing product images and copy
Adding new products images and copy
Compliance issues (both Amazon and Federal/State)
Tax collection
Inventory forecasting 
Setting up FBA shipments
Keyword indexing
Listing Optimization
Advertising and promotions
Managing returns
Communicating with customers
Reporting

Should you hire a service or do it in-house?

This is the age old question you will have to find the answer to. To help you we have provided you with a diagram. You can pick two below (but you can't have all three):
Getting your Seller Central account and listings set up properly is really important. All of your sales depend on it being done properly. You can use a service and have it done fast and cheap, but it probably won't be very good. You can do it yourself, which can be good and cheap, but it will take a long time. Or you can hire a consultant, which will be fast and good, but won't necessarily be cheap. 

Here are our recommendations:

GOOD AND CHEAP - If your company has a lot of time and an employee to dedicate to managing your account, doesn't mind losing sales for a while, and wants to try and figure out a system to put it all together - do it yourself. There are hundreds of blogs and free trainings out there, which will help you succeed, which can take between 6-12 months. Your company will probably also need to invest in some software to help you manage all of the systems eluded to above.

FAST AND CHEAP - If you don't really care about your listings or sales, but still want to have a presence on Amazon, hire a service. (We don't actually recommend you do this.)

FAST AND GOOD - If you are serious about selling on Amazon and want to jump start your sales, be given a proven strategy for selling on the Amazon platforms, as well as get training on all of the necessary elements to be successful, then hire a consultant.

If you are interested in learning more about how Brand Authority can help you be successful on Amazon, please reach out to us and request a free strategy session.

Michael Stephens


Michael Stephens helps people start and grow successful physical products businesses. He is an expert at helping brands get customers using online methods and making things super simple to understand.
If you're interested in starting your own brand or scaling up and getting customers then definitely reach out and request a free strategy session today.