The Rich and Vibrant Ecosystem of Amazon
Earlier this month, we headed to Brooklyn, the Amazon sellers capital of the world, for the Amazon Sellers Group annual conference, ASGTG #9, where over 500 Amazon sellers from around the world gathered to share their best practices for how to succeed on Amazon.
Amazon ecosystem is enormous, and can provide crazy reach and automation for sellers. Many of the successful sellers we met had their businesses on autopilot. However, it’s not necessarily easy.
Most category search pages offer a sea of similar products with low to no differentiation or brand. It’s a game of optimization and conversion, with sellers looking for any edge they can get.
The group is a vibrant community with a large variety of sellers including arbitrageurs, resellers, wholesalers, and private sellers at various stages of growth. It’s an absolute HUSTLER community. Most sellers are bootstrapped and extremely scrappy.
In this post, we’ll hear from 7 of these scrappy hustlers.
Leah Schwed from Spark Innovations
“Spark Innovations is a line of educational children's games. I am a speech therapist and built it for parents and educators wanting to engage with children and build language and communication skills. I started via word of mouth and education conferences and realized I could reach a wider audience via Amazon. But Amazon owns my customer and I started seeing Chinese copycats, so I built a website. And I am trying to grow the brand outside of Amazon. To get more people back to my website,I am working on a free add-on product available on the website for Amazon buyers.”
David Knopfler from List It Amazon
“I run a listing agency with 2 services: creating a researched and optimized listing and driving traffic to listing pages. We help create the best listings inclusive of copy, imagery, and video. Then we work to optimize with Amazon SEO and PPC. Amazon is super competitive these days. You really have to invest in PPC to be seen. We work with a lot of customers that have millions of dollars in sales and no relationship with and no pulse on their customers. It’s a big pain point.”
Joe Ainy, Founder of Dr. Jacobs Naturals
“I started the business as a side project to fill a need for my son who had eczema. We started on Shopify and then gained distribution across the US. Eventually, we got on Amazon and became a big seller there. We started doing it ourselves and made a lot of mistakes. It’s a full time job, we didn’t have time for. Now we have an agency that helps us. This year we are expanding our product line with 2 more washes and hope to grow our Amazon business.”
