Competition on Amazon: how to evaluate it with Will Tjernlund of Goat in - a podcast by Michael Veazey

Competitor Analysis on Amazon

with Will Tjernlund of Goat Consulting

People who eat sleep and breathe Amazon are focused on competitor analysis of Amazon e.g Best Seller Rank.



Whereas Will wants to deep dive into the whole marketplace and analyze the seller as a whole:



* Do they have multiple products? One?

* Are they resellers or do they have own brand?



Jungle Scout and viral launch don’t tell you who you’re competing with.



Multinational brands often have no idea what individual customers want.



The Psychology of different sellers and what they want is important.



With the agency, Will has experienced so many different business models - which has built his repertoire of knowledge.

Why is it good to compete with multinational brands? 

If you search for ‘air pods” from Apple - none of the listings are optimized!



Amazon is 3% of Apple’s total sales - an opportunity for people to rank for the AirPods keywords



* Have wallets open

* Intent to buy!



Competition analysis

Pull up sales estimation software



* How big is the pie as a whole in the first 2 pages

* Who has how much of each slice?



If everyone has 10% of a market - if you take 1% off each, you can get 10%



But in some niches, the top listing has 80% of sales; remainder splits the 20%.



Taking sales off the top listing is unlikely; The rest will be fought over scraps.

“Star Principle” 

Going after a growing niche and dominating it (% of market share) is often the winning strategy.

The problem of maxing out the pie

Some companies dominate 85% on amazon



They say - “We’re an Amazon company but We’ve maxed out ads spend.”



Will says that at this point, it’s up to the seller do email and social media marketing as Amazon may have reached its peak sale.

Seller psychology

A lot comes back to psychology



For example, is a hammer sold on a need basis?



If yes, we should be optimizing for profit, if not going for past Shelf Keeping Unit.

Easier to compete with people who are adding SKUs

Will’s brother has 200,000 Shelf Keeping Units



He uploads entire catalogs.



Those people are easy to compete with as they aren’t focussed on any particular product line.

Tell us about the type of business models that get used in the Amazon space

Example 

If you see 50% off - 200,000 listings - you can figure out a couple of things are going from them.



You can order 99 from them - are they trying to liquidate something quickly?



If they have 200,000 listings, that’s what they’re doing.



Whereas if someone is doing 50% off and have only 1 product, they are going out of business!

Main business models

Private Labeler

Listen to podcasts, tips, and tricks.



They have minimal SKUs that are focussed



They are tough to compete with as they are very aware of what is happening with relatively few SKUs and good Amazon tactical ability.

Brick and mortar stores

5% of sales on amazon



But not willing to burn bridges



These are much easier to compete with.



B2B (Business-to-Business)



Used to different sales channels and middle Men



Now coming to B2C for the first time



This is what goat consulting specializes in.

Internal culture shift in going onto Amazon

When established businesses that sell B2B(Business-to-Business)  or brick and mortar go onto Amazon, there is often a big culture shift.

Further episodes of Amazing FBA Amazon and ECommerce Podcast, for Amazon Private Label Sellers, Shopify, Magento or Woocommerce business owners, and other e-commerce sellers and digital entrepreneurs.

Further podcasts by Michael Veazey

Website of Michael Veazey