EXCLUSIVE VS MULTIPLE SELLERS: CHOOSE YOUR PATH
Amazon! The best place to grow as a business, to have a good reputation, to provide an excellent customer service. It’s no wonder that brands want to do their best to make their business on Amazon much more effective and beneficial. Studies show that almost every brand questions the need of distributing their products to multiple sellers. In response to their questions, many often mention the importance of selling the products to many sellers; however, it is always quality rather than quantity that matters. Bear in mind that sometimes having too many sellers can have harmful consequences for your brand and therefore for your business.
Prima facie, this may sound baffling; how can selling to multiple sellers be destructive for the business you build on Amazon? In practice, you’ll experience the following:
• In case of selling to many sellers, you’ll obviously have more POs. Each seller may have different management strategies which may allow them to provide you with the products outlined in POs annually or on a monthly basis. Be careful with this, since each seller’s corresponding purchase order will definitely be smaller than it would be in case of working with fewer sellers. You become increasingly vulnerable to exploitation. With many sellers, counterfeiters have an easier time mixing with your inventory and it’s easier for unauthorized sellers to acquire inventory. The combination of these effects harms your brand integrity and can rapidly erode customer trust, harming your brand’s sales both online and in physical stores.
• Marketing will be in jeopardy. This may happen because of the existing competition between your sellers. Trying to win the race, sellers spend a fortune on ads. in reality, that money could have been used in surpassing your opponents in that field.
• Your brand control wanes. Even though, working with many sellers may be beneficial, there is a risk of having your listing edited by different people who may interact with your customers. It’s important to realize that even with the best strategies, one can easily fail to implement them if one doesn’t develop a stable and effective optimization plan. Simultaneously the pricing policy will also be under risk of failure.
After the horror stories we told, it’s time to move on to the next option: selling with an exclusive seller.
• You are able to rationalize the PO process. While working with an exclusive seller, you won’t have to deal with sellers placing the POs. Instead, you will get the opportunity to devise your own plan, which will result in fastening the shipment process, reducing the number of your employees, streamline accounting, managing you time wisely, and increasing efficiency. What’s more, you will be able to Combined with the other benefits of an exclusive partnership, you’re positioned to exceed the income you could have had while working with multiple sellers.
• Your safety is guaranteed. The thing is, exclusive sellers are more reliable. There is a low chance of having counterfeits and inauthentic products in your distribution. Again, it’s about quality.
• Marketing on a completely new level: With a single seller, it will be easily to make the Sponsored Product ads work way more efficiently, because every traction the ads create is cumulated into a single seller.
• You have maximum brand control under your disposal. Less sellers, smaller range of those who can edit your listings. With a single seller you’ll be able to maintain your pricing policies without any doubt.
All in all, one home run is much better than two doubles. Think about your selling methods one more time, prior to start working with different sellers.