It’s all about convenience.
Unlike specialty stores, on and offline, Amazon customers’ behavior is driven by convenience. People shop on Amazon because it’s easy.
They’re searching, clicking, and buying fast. If your listings aren’t clear, if Prime shipping isn’t available, if the catalog is bloated or broken, they’re gone.
What this means for you: You need to tailor everything to remove every point of friction between the customer and the purchase.
It’s searches, not shelves.
Unlike in-store retail, shopper behavior on Amazon is overwhelmingly driven by direct search. Shoppers (re)search for what they need.
Their attention can’t be directed by the store organization. They don’t need a sales assistant to guide them, they have the internet. And if your products don’t come up in their research, you don’t sell.
What this means for you: Your marketing must focus on visibility in high-intent searches and problem-product fit, not general brand awareness.
Your full market goes there.
Unlike traditional stores, Amazon’s customers aren’t just a segment of your market, based on location and store type. It’s the everything store for 180M+ Prime members.
So everyone is there. From first-timers to obsessives, deal hunters to loyalists, your entire market is shopping on Amazon. For many brands, this is what their industry partners miss.
What this means for you: Your catalog and messaging needs to speak to all of them, across the spectrum, or you lose to competitors who know how to communicate to the whole market.
It’s a single gigantic store.
Unlike your B&M distribution, Amazon is a single store no matter how many sellers you have or how much volume it does. Multiple sellers don’t reach more people, they just fight for the same ones.
Having multiple sellers is like having three booths in the same store. They compete with each other, instead of grabbing market share from your competitors. This makes it impossible to grow your brand.
What this means for you: You need control over who sells your products on Amazon, and make sure they are fully owning the channel, your strategy, and your long term results.
Copy-pasting doesn’t work.
Amazon is a unique ecosystem, and your approach has to be tailored to it. But for many brands, the strategy ends up being a copy paste of what they’re already doing on other channels.
That’s a bad idea when it comes to the largest marketplace in the world.
The mental models in this article are at the core of winning Amazon strategy:
- Frictionless customer experience.
- Optimized intent-driven discovery.
- Broad audience targeting.
And the easiest way to execute on all that is to have a key expert partner.
At Zoplenti, Amazon is everything we do. Our model is built around its unique dynamics. With exclusive partnerships, proprietary technology, and full strategic alignment, we make Amazon a solved problem for our brands. Relentless execution is what we do.
