While we wait for Amazon’s Q4 results to come out to see how high they climbed in 2019, I want to share seven expert views on who is winning on Amazon right now. As a merchant on Amazon, you can have two different roles. One is as a vendor working with Amazon in a retail partnership. This is when products are sold to Amazon to be commercialized on the platform and does all the marketing for you. Or, as a third-party seller on the marketplace that uses Amazon as a platform for marketing the product. There is also a hybrid model to be a seller but benefit from Amazon’s fulfillment solution. We expected experts to respond to our Amazon Marketing Report research to say there is a slight advantage to being a vendor over a seller (or the opposite). But, responses were a lot more varied and with some interesting angles. Nils Zündorf from factor-a gave us this surprising, but also completely justified angle on the question: Amazon is obsessed with the customer experience and always makes sure the price is right, so the end-user is the winner.
More in line with what we had expected to hear, but with an interesting perspective of how the winner of yesterday is not the winner of tomorrow, was the response we got from Megan Harbold of Kenshoo:
Adam Palczewski from Philips insisted on learning to adopt Amazon’s customer experience focus:
But there is competition everywhere, and Nich Weinheimer from Kenshoo uncovered a new dimension we really hadn’t expected to see:
Are brand-holding companies preparing for this new world of digital commerce? Absolutely, as Benjamin Spiegel from P&G could testify:
Trish Carey of TC Max Marketing provided a simpler answer that is more based on the dynamic growth statistics of the moment:
Indeed, sales from third-party sellers in the Amazon marketplace represented higher sales figures than Amazon e-commerce by 15-20% and are growing at a higher rate. There are also movements from one form of sales to the other: vendors becoming sellers, losing certain data access and service levels and gaining others, making people wonder whether perhaps there could be some kind of homogenization of the two merchant models on the horizon to level the playing field. From Tanner Schroeder of Hanapin Marketing comes a different view, but also totally justifiable:
Prime, an out-of-the-ordinary loyalty program you actually pay to be a member of and which actually provides the member with real benefits, is changing the rules of the e-commerce game as it affects user behavior on one hand and becomes a product characteristic that was not previously a criteria at the moment of buying. And, thanks to Amazon leading the way in e-commerce and having the power to influence user behavior, the final quote from Evan Facinger totally makes sense:
So, we have third-party sellers winning over vendors, bold marketers winning over traditionalists, algorithm-driven metrics over traditional knowledge, service and price winning over brands, and end-users simply winning, especially via Prime, which they, of course, pay Amazon for. In 2020 there will likely be many new winners on Amazon. But the competitive space is becoming fiercer, and understanding how the ecosystem works and where to bet becomes essential. The post Who’s winning on Amazon right now? appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2S2n3Lt
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