15: How indie consumer brands can best manage Amazon with Joseph Hansen of the Prosper Show

Over the last seven years, Joseph Hanson has built and sold four e-commerce based companies and is currently a managing partner to three businesses that help sellers succeed on Amazon Buy Box Experts, Prosper Show, and Marketplace University.

It was Joseph’s experience as an Amazon expert that put him on my radar, So I’m excited to get his insights on what for SoYoung is of one of our single biggest revenue sources also  the most frustarting and confusin channels and platforms that we deal with.

Critical issues for brands

1. Brand equity: Brand equity on amazon comes through

• Search
• Reviews
• Long term history and traction on the channel

2) Managing counterfits and knockoffs

3) Having transparency or understanding how profitable their SKUs are and how each product is performing can give you a big competetive advantage.

If your product is good and desirable, it’s going to be sold on amazon

If you want to control the way your products are displayed on amazon you need to either

• Invest the time required in really owning your Amazin presence
• Develop an exclusive relationship with an expereince 3rd party seller

55% of consumers start a product search on Amazon, so you need to be there

At the end of the day price is going to be the biggest determining factor in where people choose to purchase their products. If they’re prime members, that will be a huge incentive for them to purchase directly from amazon

How amazon pricing actually works

Amazon prices reactively and you can’t set a MAP with amazon.  If you’re having MAP pricing issues on Amazon, it tends to be because you have distribution problems, selling to grey market people who are then not honoring map, forcing Amazon to do the same.

Key to controlling your Amazon channel is having airtight distribution and reseller agreements in price.

The prosper show

James founded the Prosper show to address the needs of Amazon sellers and help them with an educational based show with a level of transparency that discourages self promotion in favour of real objective education on how to best leverage Amazon.