Online marketplaces, particularly Amazon, are becoming third-party sellers' primary retail sales mode. The retail industry has experienced significant growth in this sector, as marketplaces are projected to represent 60% of overall sales, with 70% emerging from third-party sellers.
This rapid expansion elicits channel disruption as unauthorized vendors monopolize the Amazon Buy Box. Consequently, merchants must analyze market dynamics to develop a brand protection and control strategy. So what tools can you leverage to optimize channel performance and minimize disruptions?
With multiple unauthorized sellers entering Amazon’s landscape, brands' platforms can become overburdened and difficult to regulate. Channel control generates growth opportunities for new investments, products, and innovation. You can implement this solution to optimize three main business areas: pricing, authorized sales, and marketing.
Price disruptions can occur within a marketplace, your seller network, or across multiple channels. Apart from unauthorized sellers impacting optimal pricing, these disruptions may arise from inconsistent customer experiences or low-quality products. Pricing is contingent upon market fluctuations and competition across various channels, so developing a dynamic control strategy is imperative to reduce erosion.
According to Precision eControl’s CEO Blake Burrus, “On average, a brand experiences over 60 unauthorized seller listings on their products. But not all sellers are created equal. There’s a very high degree of concentration in that…three or four [unauthorized] sellers account for almost 70% of revenue destruction.” Addressing and mitigating these resellers requires acute precision and control to determine the vendor's identity and location — and to estimate lost revenue by product. A marketplace control approach helps you focus on the sellers contributing to the majority of the destruction.
Unauthorized seller interference also impacts brands’ opportunities to secure the Buy Box, limiting advertising efforts and decreasing ROAS on Amazon and other platforms. With brand protection, you can create compelling and consistent content across collective channels to enhance the customer experience.
Data science techniques are crucial in quantifying profit loss and resolving channel disruption. These strategies address the inquiries that Jay Radley, Precision eControl’s Head of Sales, proposes, “How do we create actionable, targeted plans…that can drive towards business outcomes? How do we measure that? How can we have the systems in place and the tools to know that when you take an action, you can see the corresponding benefit to your business and your overall trends across online marketplaces.”
Since disturbances and the corresponding outcomes are multifaceted and vary across channels, you must prioritize approaches and decisions to suit your business goals. This involves examining marketplace revenue trends to view both micro and macro business impacts. For instance, you can utilize data analytics to view various sales on different storefronts or obtain a more detailed perspective of product sales. From there, you can determine the appropriate action for addressing specific unauthorized activities.
Although platform control and monitoring are often used interchangeably, these methods differ in their granularity. Typical channel monitoring tools detect superficial disruptions and categorize them together. Conversely, control methods address the interruptions’ sources and possible execution methods to manage them effectively. Case in point, when complying with MAP (minimum advertised price) policies during seller disputes, it’s mandatory to employ a brand-led approach to manage workflows, communication, and data. In contrast, addressing unauthorized resellers necessitates a market-focused process to measure KPIs and outline data.
Brand disruption is a prevailing issue with nuanced protection methods entailing data analytics and market awareness. Brands should employ available tools and develop a brand protection and control strategy to minimize these disturbances and maximize profitability.
Prospering on Amazon can be arduous, especially when programs, strategies, and platforms constantly change.
Fortunately, companies like ProductWind have been testing and learning to figure out the secret sauce to succeed on Amazon. Their findings? Influencer advertising might just be the way to go.
In sharpening its approach to influencer advertising, ProductWind has mastered its strategy to help other brands train Amazon’s algorithm and drive KPIs. So what’s the formula behind influencer advertising, and why is it so lucrative?
Influencer advertising has become an increasingly popular technique to drive consumers to specific brands or products. But influencers create more than just testimonials for your brand — they craft keyword-driven content and help drive traffic, sales, ratings, and reviews.
Influencer advertising benefits your brand on multiple platforms. For example, on Amazon, influencers subliminally send signals to the platform through external traffic generated by their efforts. Over time, influencer-based traffic helps train the Amazon algorithm to love your product.
For ProductWind, influencer success isn’t measured by likes or followers. “For most companies, when you say ‘influencers’ or ‘influencer marketing,’ their mind goes to some form of public relations and talking about likes and comments,” CRO Tim Wilson explains, “That’s not what we do…if we have a choice to optimize a campaign towards driving eCommerce metrics and KPIs…that’s the path we go down.”
Influencer advertising success isn’t dependent on how many “likes” your brand gets on socials. It’s about driving metrics that are connected to sales — you can see the whole journey from influencer to Amazon to brand revenue.
Another common concern brands have is how to vet influencers. To reiterate, you shouldn’t choose your influencer partnerships based on their following. You should look for people who cater to your audience’s demographics, develop beautiful content, and drive traffic, click-through rates, and sales.
“We're looking at to what degree this person [helps] drive each one of these KPIs that you need to be successful,” Tim says. “Then we assemble a team of people with the idea that there's no one influencer who can do all these things — it takes a village.”
Like many other brands, Bose was finding it difficult to win on Amazon due to program changes and expenses. However, their partnership with ProductWind helped them use influencer advertising to get back on track, launch products quickly, and take hold of Amazon’s algorithm.
Described as “an insurance policy for product launches,” ProductWind helped Bose find the right influencers and create campaigns that drove traffic to its products. Todd Weagant, Bose’s Global Head of Sales for Amazon, has high praise for his experience. “As soon as the campaign launched,” he says, “we could see traffic going up. We could see all of our standard metrics going up. And there was nothing else to attribute it to, except for the ProductWind activity.”
There are plenty of aspects on Amazon’s platform that are out of a brand’s control. But companies like ProductWind help you train the algorithm to your brand’s advantage. ProductWind offers transparency, influencer advertising insight, and strategies to help you succeed on Amazon — and beyond.
With Amazon as the leading digital marketplace, brands are looking to optimize sales on its platform. Historically, sellers have developed separate budgets, goals, and advertising strategies for Amazon and DTC, creating silos and cementing the reputed digital divide between channels.
However, “Over the last six months…36% of the Amazon users going to product detail pages actually come from offline sources,” says Blue Wheel’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Nicole Reich. This indicates that consumers are either directed to Amazon by influencers or start their searches on other websites.
So how can you integrate your Amazon and DTC efforts to develop an omnichannel strategy that enhances the customer journey?
Merging Amazon and DTC channels helps establish comprehensive marketing tactics that maximize visibility on both sites. Segregated advertising limits your efforts to one channel, hindering sales and compromising storage and revenue. Tayler Carpenter, Blue Wheel’s VP of Advertising, speaks to the significance of combining strategies: “By having one large macro marketing calendar and one large macro budget and marketing initiatives, we can start putting together the pieces that will make up the larger plan that allows you, as the brand, to have more control and an understanding of what’s going on in…your marketing, business, and omni-commerce.”
Customer lifecycle data is a valuable DTC marketing tool for cross-promoting Amazon products. For instance, when DTC customers sign up for your email list, and you capture their mobile numbers, you can send text messages to promote new product launches, deals, and inventory restocks on your Amazon site. One in three shoppers prefer receiving texts to emails, and 73% have made a purchase after obtaining one; leveraging DTC communication helps grow your Amazon brand.
TikTok is dominating the social media landscape, and many younger consumers begin their searches on this platform, making it a fundamental advertising tool. Maximizing product discovery requires regularly appearing on numerous “for you” pages — a user’s curated algorithm — by including the hashtag Amazon on each video. When you optimize videos with appropriate hashtags, TikTok categorizes them to display relevant content related to individual searches.
The ultimate goal when advertising on TikTok is to become viral, boosting conversions and sales on your Amazon site. Yet this can lead to inventory shortages, so it’s crucial to incorporate DTC with your Amazon store as an alternative for fulfilling product demands.
Amazon’s Buy with Prime option is evolving to accommodate omnichannel capabilities. When employing this program on your DTC website, consumers can purchase products using their Amazon information and receive two-day shipping, creating a familiar and seamless customer experience. Additionally, Buy with Prime enables brands to leverage Amazon fulfillment centers to fulfill both DTC and Amazon orders, thereby consolidating multiple channels. A Buy with Prime strategy may increase conversions by 25% and drive additional traffic to your website.
By recognizing and forming a correlation between DTC and Amazon operations, you can acquire additional customers and boost sales to expand your business.
As Amazon continues to dominate the digital landscape, advertising is becoming increasingly competitive, and strategies to influence customers are progressing across multiple channels. But many brands still develop ad objectives, measure performance, and make costly decisions through business-specific sales, customer, and profit data.
This finite approach lacks consideration for the larger market that includes competitors, industry trends, and consumer shopping habits.
So how can you develop a market-aware advertising method to optimize your strategies and improve brand performance?
When making industry-informed decisions, identifying your ideal market is fundamental to your strategy. Traditional methods of pinpointing an audience involve positioning products into categories. Yet this approach may be either too broad or too narrow since Amazon has over 16,000 dynamic subcategories, and brands often misclassify their products.
A more effective model is to determine a specific set of product ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Number) that generate sales volume and address shopper needs. Customers express their intentions through search terms; two similar products may rank with the same keyword if consumers purchase both products after their search. Your established ASINs must reflect Amazon’s overall competition and consumer trends, so referencing the Amazon Search Terms report is crucial to ensure a comprehensive collection. This report displays Amazon’s top-ranked keywords by frequency and popularity. You can also search for your ASINs to determine bestselling items and correlating terms and compare those against trending words and products.
By gathering and analogizing keywords and similar-ranking products, you can compile ASINs that help you create small, precise markets for tactical decision-making.
Once you’ve defined a profitable market for your ads, it’s essential to implement a strategy to extract value from your efforts. Competitive intelligence drives sales and consumers away from competitors to your Amazon storefront. The optimal way to expropriate sales from adversaries is to create targeted ad campaigns like sponsored displays that allow you to advertise on another brand’s product detail pages. It’s recommended to optimize this strategy by targeting the top-selling item in a brand’s category.
Another technique is to employ Amazon DSP to entice customers who viewed a competitor's product detail page without making a purchase. You should retarget shoppers after they’ve left the page to compare your ad or product with the rival. The third competitive approach involves leveraging your competition’s top-ranking keywords through an aggressive top-of-search campaign. After confirming these search terms, compare your organic rankings with a contender and place bids on the top-of-search placements to outrank them.
Quantifying your advertisements’ impacts on sales and revenue is crucial for business development. The conventional approach to measuring performance involves developing a target ROAS (return on ad spend) to structure your advertising methods. But to compare sales and profits with your competitors, you must consider your company’s market share.
Analyzing market trends and developments helps you determine the seasonal factors — namely Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday — impacting your sales volume. You can also utilize these measurements to assemble an ideal ad budget consistent with your target market. For instance, Franz Jordan, Perpetua’s VP and General Manager, says, “If your market is growing by 20% on average, then your budget should also grow by 20%.”
Ultimately, a competitive advertising landscape should implement intentional solutions that drive sales and maximize profit for long-term prosperity.
Martin Heubel is the Strategy and Amazon Consultant at Consulterce, a strategy consultancy helping B2C household and CPG brands increase their 1P vendor profits on Amazon. As the founder, he has over five years of experience assisting CPG and household brands to master their bottom line. Before Consulterce, Martin was a Senior Category Manager at Amazon, where he helped brands such as Nestle and Mars turn their digital retail operations into high-performing, eight-figure accounts.
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During Q4 in 2022, Amazon withdrew inventory to prevent overstocking, disrupting availability and trade relationships between brands, Amazon, and suppliers. With this risk aversion impacting supply and demand, how can brands remain savvy to sustain inventory and profits?
According to Amazon consultant Martin Heubel, Amazon Vendor Negotiations (AVN) are crucial in developing an operational strategy for the coming year. During these mediations, Amazon determines fair trade agreements, including product pricing and margins, that brands must observe to prevent listing removals, Buy Box suspension, and inventory shortages. Maintaining stock and profitability requires analyzing your portfolio structure to mitigate risk and engaging with Amazon throughout the year. It’s imperative to understand and manage your margins, orders, catalogs, and financials to communicate market value and stay relevant.
Martin Heubel, Strategy and Amazon Consultant at Consulterce, is Aaron Conant’s guest on today’s episode of The Digital Deep Dive. They discuss the current and future states of Amazon’s business model. Martin also shares how brands can maintain inventory in 2023, advice for winning AVNs, and how the platform’s risk aversion affects brands.
BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.
We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.
Franz Jordan is the General Manager and Vice President of Perpetua, a SaaS platform that helps brands, media agencies, and Amazon sellers improve ad performance through AI-powered automation. He has nearly 10 years of experience as an entrepreneur in the Amazon, eCommerce, and market intelligence spaces. Before Perpetua, Franz was the Co-founder and CEO of Sellics, the premier provider of AI-powered B2B SaaS solutions that Perpetua acquired.
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Advertising is becoming increasingly complex as platforms seek to drive revenue by increasing ad volume and value. With so many factors influencing ROAS and sales, how can you leverage the precise data and strategies to outperform competitors and maintain relevance?
Market intelligence expert Franz Jordan urges brands to analyze long-term, holistic performance data on multiple advertising formats, including DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). This data should encompass acquisition costs and customer lifetime value. Yet brand-specific data and goals aren’t sufficient enough to optimize ad performance, so Franz recommends leveraging market-aware and competitive intelligence by evaluating pricing, top-selling ASINS, product reviews, and keyword rankings.
Join Aaron Conant in today’s episode of The Digital Deep Dive as he sits down with Franz Jordan, General Manager and VP of Perpetua, to talk about competitive and market-aware advertising strategies. Franz also shares how brands should consider the evolving ad landscape, how to leverage AMC, and cutting-edge strategies to differentiate yourself from competitors.
BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.
We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.
Todd Hassenfelt is the eCommerce Director of Growth Strategy and Planning at Colgate-Palmolive, an innovative growth company that reimagines a healthier future for people, pets, and the planet. He has extensive leadership experience in brick-and-mortar and eCommerce channels, serving as a leader on both sales and marketing teams.
Todd has also sold some of the top brands in the US to multiple channels, including C-store, mass merchandisers, wholesale clubs, supermarkets, and eCommerce. As an eCommerce and content contributor, his articles appear in publications, including BRAVE Commerce, Ecommerce Braintrust, and The Digital Shelf Cast.
Chat GPT’s widespread adoption has initiated the release of GPT-4, with capabilities extending far beyond text to include images and videos. GPT-4’s potential has opened up additional opportunities for workflow efficiencies and creativity. What should you consider about this revolutionary technology, and how can you apply it in your organization?
Todd Hassenfelt maintains that adopting GPT-4 requires a delicate balance between use case opportunities and risk mitigation to avoid copyright infringements and other lawsuits. Once you’ve executed the appropriate due diligence with your legal team, you can leverage GPT-4 to analyze product reviews, optimize content, and personalize ads for consumers. For instance, this generative AI can examine a product detail page to determine common themes among customer reviews. It can also recommend top keywords for SEO.
Todd Hassenfelt, eCommerce Director of Growth Strategy and Planning at Colgate-Palmolive, joins Aaron Conant in today’s episode of The Digital Deep Dive to talk about how GPT-4 is disrupting generative AI. Todd mentions how brands can implement GPT-4, generative AI’s role in customer personalization, and how to train generative AI models.
BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.
We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.
Andrew Lipsman is the Principal Analyst at Insider Intelligence, the leading research, data, and insights provider helping companies maximize revenue, optimize ad spend, and anticipate digital disruption. In his role, he reports on retail and eCommerce, following trends, including holiday shopping, retail media, social commerce, DTC brands, and leading marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. Andrew has spoken at multiple conventions, including Big Show, Shoptalk, and Groceryshop. He is quoted frequently by publications, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times.
Retail media has monopolized the digital advertising landscape, and major retailers are developing ad networks to compete with Amazon. Walmart is the second largest media system with a $6 ROAS, and Target and Instacart aren’t far behind. Given the recent growth and competition, omnichannel strategies are essential to profit in this evolving space. So how should you structure your advertising efforts to prepare for impending retail media developments?
Digital analyst Andrew Lipsman has observed three key drivers of retail media. With prominent retailers like Walmart and Target optimizing the customer experience, brands must ascend the advertising funnel by leveraging onsite media to deliver ads across social platforms and TV streaming. Traditionally, brands have analyzed ROAS for online sales. Now, you can capitalize on in-store retail media and attribution data to drive offline sales. But Andrew warns against over-personalizing in-store advertising to risk losing customer trust. Instead, develop brand awareness by incorporating on-screen QR codes that tap into loyalty programs and encourage purchases across multiple channels.
In today’s episode of The Digital Deep Dive, Aaron Conant chats with Andrew Lipsman, Principal Analyst at Insider Intelligence, about the current and future state of retail media. Andrew also talks about AI’s role in data analytics, the challenges retailers face when developing ad networks, and the ideal metrics for optimizing ad spend.
BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.
We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.
Jacob Harrison is the Director of eCommerce Investment Strategy at CMI Media Group, a full-service media agency specializing in strategic healthcare marketing. For more than eight years, he has launched, developed, and implemented some of the largest marketing programs in the retail, finance, and consumer goods spaces. Jacob has built and led world-class teams and driven significant growth for agencies, including Sparkroom and retailers such as Toys R Us and DSW.
In recent years, retail media has dominated the digital landscape, and various industries, including consumer packaged goods (CPG) and fashion, have pioneered major advertising networks to market and sell their products. DTC channels provide viable opportunities for the pharmaceutical industry to target consumers and improve the healthcare experience. But Rx distribution is heavily regulated as brands must comply with HIPAA and other data privacy laws. So what’s the most effective way to employ eCommerce marketing to build brand awareness?
Healthcare has experienced a significant shift to digital with online patient forms, virtual doctor visits, and more. Jacob Harrison says that brands can leverage patients’ growing familiarity with digital to offer information on medications and provide seamless prescription refills. Partnering with leading pharma retailers like Walgreens and CVS allows you to capitalize on consumer data to develop targeted ads, maximizing conversions and ROI.
In this episode of The Digital Deep Dive, Aaron Conant welcomes Jacob Harrison, Director of eCommerce Investment Strategy, to talk about how the healthcare industry is utilizing eCommerce to enhance the patient experience. Jacob also shares how organizations are leveraging ad networks to market products, the limitations of pharmaceutical distribution, and the importance of a digital R&D budget.
BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.
We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.
Rick Watson is the CEO and Founder of RMW Commerce Consulting, which provides eCommerce strategy consulting to help businesses accelerate their go-to-market processes. Rick founded the company after spending more than 20 years as a technology entrepreneur and operator in the eCommerce industry with companies including ChannelAdvisor, BarnesandNoble.com, and Pitney Bowes.
During a partnership with WHP Global, he was a critical resource in architecting the WHP+ platform, a turnkey DTC digital eCommerce platform powering AnneKlein.com and JosephAbboud.com. Rick hosts The Watson Weekly podcast, where he shares his unbiased, expert take on the retail sector’s biggest news and executives. As a television and conference speaker, he has been featured on national news programs and many retail-focused industry events.
The eCommerce business is evolving and becoming more extensive. Amazon is no longer the exclusive selling channel, as brands are beginning to experiment with Walmart and Target’s online marketplaces. So what should you consider about these stores, and how can you diversify your brand to reach a wider audience?
Walmart’s eCommerce channel experienced a higher yearly growth rate than Amazon, with the platform growing 12% in 2022. Yet Walmart is still a growing channel, so Rick Watson warns not to overspend or allocate every resource there. Target offers one to two-day drop-shipping capabilities, and although the emerging marketplace is promising, its categories are broad and unregulated. As a DTC (direct-to-consumer) brand, it’s critical to consider your target audience’s shopping habits and expand your products into multiple marketplaces to attract new consumers.
In this episode of The Digital Deep Dive, Aaron Conant welcomes Rick Watson, CEO and Founder of RMW Commerce Consulting, back to the show to discuss eCommerce marketplace trends. Rick also addresses considerations for selling DTC, AI’s role in UGC (user-generated content), and how he helps entrepreneurs build their eCommerce businesses.
BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.
We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.
