Amazon makes it easier than ever to get your products in front of millions of potential customers…
And with their recent acquisition of Whole Foods, ecommerce sellers may finally have a good way to break into the retail space.
Which makes this the million dollar question: How do you capitalize on Amazon’s massive success without giving away too much control of your business?
What are the potential risks and rewards you should be looking out for?
How will the future of Amazon affect your other sales channels?
In this video, I asked Digital Marketer founder Roland Frasier, Amazon expert Ryan Moran, and two other amazing marketers to weigh in on the future of Amazon and ecommerce.
This is a great post for any entrepreneur who’s currently selling on Amazon or thinking about adding it as a new sales channel this year.
Video Highlights:
0:10 Amazon will continue to dominate most searches
1:10 Amazon makes it possible to put your product in front of millions of customers
1:43 We’ve been working on making brands rather than just selling products
2:27 You are going to see entrepreneurs be completely empowered by the revolution that is happening in ecommerce
Click Here For Video Transcript
Maxwell: What’s amazing with Shopify and Amazon and ecommerce is it’s empowering these people to start businesses to experiment, to try things they never woulda tried before.
Roland: Amazon will continue to dominate most searches now, I think it’s 45% of the searches now start with Amazon as opposed to a search engine which has dropped to about 38%. So, I think you’ll see more people figuring out how to deal with that so that they can have a presence on Amazon but not give away the store to Amazon at the same time.
Michael: The things that keep me up at night as far as my business and ecommerce, number one is Amazon, you know, just having part of my business in someone else’s sandbox if you will, where they can dictate changes that could completely adversely affect my business does trouble me and scare me. They also seem to be not at the same time of doing things that adversely affect sellers like myself, they’re also growing at the same time. So, they’re able to kinda push their thumb on people more and more as they get larger and larger.
Ryan: One of the greatest signs of the trends happening right now is the acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon. We are basically eliminating all of the barriers for really good products to win. Amazon makes it possible to put your product in front of millions of customers, and over the next couple of years, we’re going to see Amazon now take those winners and put ’em onto retail shelves.
Maxwell: I see that trend continuing of bringing less and less barriers or knocking down barriers and having less and less friction to start a business which is gonna help that mom of three or that college guy or whoever it is, that grandma, grandpa at home that has a cool idea and a neat idea for a product actually execute that.
Roland: We’ve been working on making brands rather than just selling products. The brand part of it becomes a destination for us, they can come to our site, they can come to other channels. So, we look at Amazon as just a channel in our business, but again the problem is it always becomes the largest channel no the matter how hard I seem to try. Because as we can think to grow our off Amazon business, Amazon then grows double or triple in that same time because they’re just like a behemoth, so that definitely worries me.
Ryan: Differentiating themselves from Amazon by having some sort of valuable content and content marketing, building an audience around the content, aggregating that attention is gonna be critical to anybody that wants to be successful outside of a major market place like Amazon.
Ryan: I think you are going to see entrepreneurs be completely empowered by the revolution that is happening in ecommerce because ecommerce is no longer ecommerce, it is just commerce.
