E-commerce: Lessons Learned From Being an Amazon Partner
Becoming an Amazon.com Merchant is a tremendous way to supercharge your Internet exposure, said Sally Rue, former director of consumer business at Caswell-Massey, a soap and toiletries multichannel merchant, during her talk at the conference of the eCommerce and Catalog Systems Forum, held March 3 and 4 in New Orleans.
Caswell-Massey’s foray into the Amazon world boosted the merchant’s incremental sales and enabled it to achieve better prospecting. “No question, it was 100 percent worth it,” said Rue, now an e-business consultant who retains her ties with Caswell-Massey. Indeed, in December, Caswell-Massey, a tiny firm by most measures, had three of the top 10 selling items on Amazon’s Beauty Store.
But devising a partnership with an 800 pound gorilla like Amazon requires careful planning. Following are the lessons she and her colleagues at Caswell-Massey learned while becoming an Amazon Merchant:
¥ Read the contract carefully. Amazon requires adherence to numerous practices as spelled out in its lengthy contract, said Rue. For example, Amazon devoted about five pages just to answering the question of who”owns” the Caswell-Massey customer. “If a new customer comes onto your file from the Amazon site, you can subsequently send direct marketing pieces, such as postcards or catalogs, to that person,” said Rue. “But you can’t market to them online. Amazon doesn’t allow e-mail marketing to Amazon-acquired names, and you can’t share those names with direct mail cooperatives.”
¥ Understand your overall costs. “We had to develop XML feeds between our existing Web site and Amazon,” Rue noted. Caswell-Massey hired a Web development firm for this work. Also, the cataloger implemented a solution that builds customized reports so it could extract data from its commerce management system and return it to Amazon, as per Amazon’s request. These and other back-end processes took one employee three months of preparation and testing, said Rue, all adding to Caswell-Massey’s implementation costs.
¥ Understand the challenges in integration. For example, Amazon breaks out shipping costs for customers per item, not at the order level as Caswell-Massey does. This complicates Caswell-Massey’s returns and exchange processes. “And because Amazon is never down, testing on its site is live, which means real credit card numbers and referral fees are being charged in real-time right from the get-go,” said Rue, who added that being an Amazon Merchant is not for the faint of heart.
