From the Frontlines: Your Amazon Guy
This business is simple, but that doesn’t mean its easy. I’m guessing you are here because private-labeling challenges.
It’s hard to re-invent the garlic press every year.
Making your own brand and product absolutely requires a creative mind to develop valuable features and valuable marketing to create a winning product.
Distribution is much more simple than private-labeling because in its most basic form you only have to find products where supply & demand are offset. Then you buy low & sell high and keep the remainder for yourself…
The problem presents itself that you cannot easily find products to “distribute”.
There are dozens of posts on reddit about “how to source a product from distributors” and I love how pure and naive these questions are.
The fact is that none of these people have stopped to ask themselves how to provide value in the model…
How do I provide/extract value in this deal?
The answer is not obvious, because most manufacturers can now figure out how to sell directly with Amazon.
This leaves two opportunities:
- Find Manufacturers/Wholesalers without direct sales channels to Amazon, and work with them
- Find Manufacturers/Wholesalers with inefficient Amazon sales, and prove to them you can add value and increase sales.
1. Find Manufacturers and Wholesales needing Amazon Distribution
I will start with this because it is more simple. You need to find companies that are already making product with a decent name for themselves. These products are already into standard nationwide distribution but they lack a real Amazon presence. You can find these when you see brands on Amazon that are barely ever sold by Amazon, and all the other offers are sold by numerous different 3P seller accounts.
Your goal is to become another 3P seller account and get better pricing, grow your volume, get better pricing, grow your selection, get advertising money, grow. grow. grow.
The main thing all these companies want is to sell more stuff! Think if you patented a garlic press, the best ever quickest and cheapest garlic press, and also think about these inventors are old geezers that don’t like computers! You probably wouldn’t want to deal with selling stuff and bookkeeping but would rather keep inventing things.
You have to talk about selling their products that never sell.
2. Find Manufacturers and Wholesales with Amazon Optimization Opportunities
This is phase two, because it requires you to be incredibly intimate with Amazon practices that you can confidently tell manufacturers that you can grow their business.
How do you do that? EXPERIENCE. Period. End of sentence. There is no shortcut to experience, because you have to live on SellerCentral/VendorCentral long enough to know where everything is, know where the damn pixels are, know the names of resources and files, because you need to be able to answer silly questions from dozens of employees without saying “i’ll get back to you”. You need to be able to say “your product could have sold 3x but you didn’t ship enough orders..”