How Brands Can Thrive Alongside Amazon’s Private Labels [Webinar Recap]

With over 55% of product searches starting on Amazon, brands can no longer ignore the e-commerce platform as a unique, independent sales channel. As an increasing number of brands learn to adapt their business strategies to include Amazon, they will also need to account for Amazon’s growing portfolio of 125+ private labels. In our latest Amazon experts webinar, Feedvisor’s Director of Enterprise Sales Justin Halle was joined by former Amazonian Andrea Riposati to discuss strategic ways that your brand can maintain its brand value while remaining profitable and competitive in the midst of Amazon’s private label initiative. Amazon’s first line of private label products — AmazonBasics — was created in 2009, with a handful of products like batteries and audio cables. Initially, Amazon was inserting itself in categories where they were the market leader and had seen success for many years, such as consumer electronics. However, the line now boasts more than 1,500 items, with products ranging from camera equipment and headphones to bedding and travel accessories. Amazon was intent from the beginning upon protecting their relationships with brands and did not want to put any of them at stake.

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Preventing Brand Erosion: What Can You Do as a Brand on Amazon?

Amazon’s constantly growing list of private label brands has the capacity to impact both first and second tier brands that are operating on the marketplace. In the webinar, Andrea gave the example of leading notebook brand, Moleskin. Amazon has launched an AmazonBasics notebook that competes head to head with one of Moleskin’s top sellers and the item has quickly gained market share in the high-end notebook space. Amazon, with intimate knowledge of their algorithm, has been aggressively advertising and pushing their branded notebook against the leading SKU from Moleskin. On the Moleskin item’s Sponsored Products ad, the AmazonBasics item is the first item in the lineup. Despite not having the best reviews, Amazon is constantly investing in their brand through ad promotion. In order to stay profitable and competitive alongside Amazon’s private label products, our Amazon experts drove home a key takeaway from the webinar presentation: own your brand and own your category. Take any necessary steps to ensure that your brand is number one in your applicable product categories. To drive traffic and conversion to your products, here are a few actionable recommendations you can take: 1. Perform an analysis of your KPIs down to the SKU level. Be sure to look with a brand and category lens as well, but prioritize looking at your portfolio on a SKU-specific basis. If your catalog is too large to do so, focus on your top sellers. This analysis can include ad optimization to make sure that you are leveraging all angles to increase conversion. 2. Monitor your advertising strategy by campaign. You can run targeted and specific advertising campaigns to drive net new customers and sales on your brand to ensure that you maintain the leadership position in your category. 3. Keep a specialized focus on Amazon’s private label items, tracking their ad placements and organic ranking so you can constantly benchmark your performance against theirs on an ongoing basis. 4. Review your sales and traffic report on a regular basis. With insights into your ordered product sales, units ordered, total order items, average sales and units per order items, average selling price, and sessions, you will be more in tune to your sales trends and any spikes or dips in traffic.