How To Build A Million Dollar Brand On Amazon?

When I’d started out doing business on Amazon, I was intimidated. It’s Amazon for crying out loud, the epitome of innovation, possibly the best customer service, perfect execution, highly diversified offerings, outstanding user experiences and finally, an ‘in it to crush it’ attitude! (I’ll talk about what makes Amazon what it is in another post).

With Amazon now accounting for 40% of all e-commerce sales globally, more than half of the world’s population go to Amazon to search for a product. More than 50% of all Amazon sales come from third-party sellers. There are over 5 million sellers across all Amazon marketplaces and as we speak, 1,029,528 new sellers have joined Amazon as of now and its only the middle of the year. Amazon has thus become a default selling platform for many consumer brands, and I joined the bandwagon.

I realized; Amazon has one of the best business models ever. Creating a powerhouse brand on the world’s largest E-commerce marketplace is not as tough as it looks. I will tell you my story here. 

I didn’t have any background in e-commerce neither did I have any entrepreneurial experience in the field. I am a business strategist and once I started, I let things fall into place. I really feel starting small is the best way to go. Some people are intimidated and think that starting a new company costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. But with the brand I started, the total investment was feasible. The money went toward inventory, logo design, brand development and paid marketing. My partner and I stayed on a tight budget and have been reinvesting the profits as sales started coming in.

Considering the nuances of the market when starting to sell on Amazon is key. I conducted some keyword research. I tried to find something that had a lot of traffic and something that you can get at a decent price point. I think a lot of it comes down to trying to find a good manufacturer, too—that’s one of the hardest things, but once sorted can be a blessing. 

When it comes to selling, selling at a premium price point is a lot harder for a new business owner. But if sellers can zero in on a high-quality product, offer it at a reasonable price and provide solid customer service, they possess the most important puzzle pieces necessary to gain traction on Amazon. This is what it taught me ? if you do these three things right, half your battle is won. 

We started selling smaller products that are lightweight since they’re easier to ship and focusses more on a smaller number of SKUs. Since Amazon is so review heavy, listing thousands of products is tough unless sellers can figure out how to get customer ratings on all those items. 

It’s tough to get the sales velocity. You’re not going to have a thousand products on the top one or two pages. A lot of your products are probably on page five to 10 or 20. And that likely would only lead to a sale every few days or every couple of weeks. What made it easy for us was focusing on a handful of categories and put a lot of emphasis on getting reviews - to get ranked higher. 

We also made sure our listing content wad top notch. This is very, very, very important! I have seen so many products on Amazon that look very tacky or cheap or they’re from overseas brands where the photography does not cater at all to the audience.

Getting a professional photographer to shoot product images is critical. So is hiring a copy writer if sellers don’t have the skills to write descriptions and articulately list crucial bullet points on their own. Before launching a product, we also decided the brand name that made sense and had a nice ring to it along with designing a logo. It doesn’t have to fancy. We also got our trademarks in place as part of the process of opening a storefront. These are simple things that make your brand official and legitimate. 

Next, we invested in paid advertising for our sales to pick up. Getting found is obviously the first thing you want, much before sales happen right? The best solution is to invest in paid advertising right on the platform. Amazon has its own pay-per-click advertising platform called Sponsored Products. In the beginning, we shelled out quite some cash, but the investments funneled traffic to listings, which jump-started sales and spurred reviews.

I will now talk about reviews on Amazon, one of the most important things for conversion. The more reviews you have, the more likely you are to get sales. We tried to get the first couple of reviews as early as we could, within weeks of a product launch. This gave us a leg up, but it takes a lot, possibly a ton of energy to sway a buyer. We used an auto response to encourage a buyer to leave a review. All said and done, organic Facebook and Instagram pages still played a crucial role. We also focused on the website and all our pages were interlinked. It did take a few months but funneling traffic to Amazon did happen. 

I hope this post has been helpful. Good luck!