The Amazon Jungle. Rick Cesari

from the Amazon School of Hard Knocks, like boot camp, gave me the raw experience and fortitude necessary to succeed on the retail platform. It also forced me to work smart and create a process that is repeatable and dependable—even on a platform that is unpredictable and often contrary. Amazon is not for everybody. I get asked all the time about what it takes to become a Top Seller, and as much as I like to quantify stuff, defining the characteristics of the hundreds of Top Sellers I’ve met over the years is really tough. That said, I’m always on the lookout for patterns, and it’s hard to ignore some of the most recognizable traits of the people I’ve come to admire, both for their achievements and for the ways in which they’ve persevered on Amazon.

5 COMMON TRAITS OF AMAZON TOP SELLERS

      1 1.They run the marathon; not the sprint

      2 2.They don’t sweat the small stuff (and they press on)

      3 3.They have a sense of style and they use it to build a great brand

      4 4.They value metrics and enjoy tracking them (ad nauseam)

      5 5.They are lifelong learners, who simply must keep learning to survive

OWN YOUR DESTINY

      While hard work and perseverance are among the qualities of the Amazon Top Sellers I’ve known, it takes a whole lot more to be successful in today’s virtual marketplace. The sheer volume of competition, coupled with Amazon’s price-squeezing tactics, make it nearly impossible to prevail on attitude alone. Remember at the top of this chapter I said that the pace of growth at Amazon forced my brothers and me to rethink our entire approach to selling online? It’s true. Once Amazon started buying our products and selling them for less, all bets were off. The tireless work ethic we brought to the platform in 2003 was no longer enough to keep us on top.

      Over the next decade, I concentrated on developing a winning formula. We wanted to do better than just make ends meet on Amazon, and with thousands of competitors pouring onto the platform every day, we knew we had to establish a reliable game plan. I became obsessed with our performance data, making incremental adjustments to every aspect of our selling and marketing processes, and measuring the results. Ironically, Amazon’s own customer feedback tools and limited metrics would come to feature prominently in my Seller’s Survival Guide. But the most dependable tactic? Branding. Today’s Third-Party Seller has the unique advantage of shaping their brand message and controlling the narrative about their products and services—far more than Amazon Retail and its 1P sellers. Brand-building is one area where Amazon and its minions fall short, and the steps for building an enduring twenty-first century brand are an integral part of what was to become The Amazon Jungle Seller’s Survival Guide. While my brothers and I understood how to create a cool brand, having created several of our own, it wasn’t until I met Rick Cesari, the pioneer of direct response television marketing, that my survival guide got a major upgrade.

      I still remember like it was yesterday, sitting in the audience of an opening conference session led by Rick. It was the 2016 Prosper Show for Amazon Sellers, where thousands of Third-Party Sellers have access to dozens of leading solutions and industry experts, like Rick. In his captivating keynote presentation, Rick made a simple point, the gravity of which nearly floored me at the time: features tell, but benefits sell. Now Rick didn’t originate the phrase, but in the examples he shared with us that day, working with products like The Juiceman, Sonicare, OxiClean, and GoPro, Rick profoundly altered the way I marketed products going forward.

      I mentioned in the introduction that I introduced myself to Rick after that presentation, where we discovered we lived in neighboring towns just east of Seattle. Our proximity nurtured a mutual friendship and weekly coffee meetings, where we exchanged strategies to boost sales and build brands. We made a deal that I would teach him everything I knew about Amazon, and he would teach me everything he knew about building great brands. It was Rick who urged me to launch my own marketing agency, and he who gave me the confidence to guide other Amazon Sellers in following the same proven formula that worked so well for me and my brothers. Additionally, I now had Rick’s direct response marketing lessons to add to my survival guide, with first-hand experience in what a difference that makes!

      After meeting Rick at the conference, my brothers and I applied what we learned about highlighting a product’s benefits over its features. We changed our Product Detail Pages to tout the lifestyle advantages of our air hockey tables, for example, like bringing friends and family together, instead of focusing on the size of the blower. Within a week we saw a 400% increase in engagement on our website and a 25% jump in sales. We were no longer selling a sturdy table with a high-end blower. We were helping families make memories!

      In the following chapters, we’ll walk you through the fundamental steps for finding and listing a winning product, drawing on the combined expertise and experience of a battle-tested Amazon Seller and a Product Whisperer. The Amazon Jungle Seller’s Survival Guide that Rick and I have crafted together here will put you in a position to own your own destiny as an Amazon Top Seller. More importantly, you’ll have the skillset for building an enduring brand, on and off the Amazon.com platform.

      Building a twenty-first century brand requires you to authentically tell your customer why you chose the product you’re selling and how their lives will be changed for the better when they buy it. In the next chapter, I share my personal story and how it followed an unlikely path to Top-Seller status. Later we’ll share tips for writing your own back story. In Chapter 3, I’ll help you determine whether there’s a suitable market for your product and how to make your product stand out in a crowd. In Section II, “Let’s Get Started,” you’ll learn how to get your product made, plus foundational steps for getting your product listed for search and for sales whether you are new to Amazon or already have listings. In chapters 6 and 7, we’ll show you how Top Sellers consistently optimize their listings using the same Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) marketing tactics that helped Rick create so many enduring brands. In the final chapters of the book, we’ll focus on expanding your business on and off Amazon, and I’ll talk specifically about the role Amazon Ads play in fortifying your Amazon business. As I mentioned earlier, listing your products on Amazon is a fundamental feature of every product marketing plan, but limiting yourself to Amazon limits your chances of creating a brand that will thrive. In Chapter 10, Rick talks about the value of expanding your business and building your brand off Amazon, with recommended strategies from his omnichannel approach to marketing.

      There is a lot of information out there about how to make your fortune on Amazon, but being successful online requires more than a mechanical list of steps for listing your products on Amazon. In these pages, Rick and I have tried to capture our combined 50+ years of selling and marketing experience and boil it down to the human element, because what matters to your customer is what sells. And it all begins with what matters most to you.

      CHAPTER SUMMARY

       •The Amazon.com platform has dramatically evolved over three decades and has permanently reshaped retail.

       •If you’re not on Amazon, you’re not online.

       •More people go to Amazon to search for products than they go to online search engines, like Google or Bing.

       •More than half of all Sellers on Amazon are Third-Party Sellers.

       •While there are 5 million Sellers on Amazon, fewer than 5% (200,000 Sellers) are generating $100,000 or more in annual sales.

       •There is an untapped opportunity for a small group of Sellers.

       •There