“Drug, Food Sales Will Power Amazon’s Growth” – Amazon Dominance and What It Means for Small to Mid-Sized Suppliers

Amazon captured 5.6 percent of total U.S. retail market share in 2017, but according to recent reports, its retail market share will reach 9.6 percent by 2020.  “The shift to online grocery is being driven by consumers’ increasing comfort with buying almost anything online, along with greater product availability and improvement in the supply chain to offer faster delivery,” said Joseph Feldman, Telsey Advisor Group.

See it.  Want it.  Buy it.  Get it.  And with free overnight shipping.  Hard to resist a retailer that literally sells just about anything.  Sure, you’ve bought books, toys, clothes and perhaps some household necessities.  But based on analyst reports, you (and everybody else) are not just buying the basics.  Appliances, electronics and automotive & industrial supplies all have found a place on the “Earth’s Biggest Selection.”  So too have the healthcare and grocery products.  In fact, those industries are poised to help boost Amazon’s growth nearly 10% in the next couple of years.

And that’s great news for suppliers, especially since more than 75 percent of US online consumers shop on Amazon most of the time.  With those numbers, it’s the perfect time for small to mid-sized suppliers to leverage Amazon’s market dominance.  Fortunately, they provide selling guidelines to ease the process, but you’ll need more than guidelines to get the visibility and revenue results your business wants.

Best Practices:

1. Have a strategy to manage your product and catalog data efficiently (data collection and manual maintenance can take a long time delaying your product launch).
2. Ensure high degree of data quality (customers move to other brands when there is missing, inconsistent or inaccurate data).
3. Streamline your digital asset management (customers expect to see images and videos along with the product details).
4. Have a strategy to be agile and meet the data requirements of retailers (each retailer has its own template, data requirements and formats) – manually maintaining each retailers’ requirements is costly and error-prone.

All of these best practices point to having a PIM solution in place in order to efficiently aggregate product data, enrich the data with channel specific attributes, perform data quality checks & validations and publish the data in each retailers format.

Fortunately, Innovit is here to help.  With hundreds of manufacturers successfully selling their brands, we can walk you through the PIM landscape to help make your products Amazon-friendly!