No Resellers, No Exceptions
Amazon is no longer just a bottom-of-the-funnel sales platform—it’s a full-funnel brand growth machine. Yet many enterprise and B2B brands still approach Amazon with an outdated mindset, allowing resellers to dictate their presence rather than taking direct control. This fragmented approach leads to poor brand representation, pricing inconsistencies, and missed growth opportunities. This is why at Avenue7Media, we believe that the ideal Amazon strategy is much simpler: only the brand should sell its products on Amazon—no resellers, no exceptions.
When brands allow third-party resellers to control their presence, they sacrifice pricing integrity, brand consistency, and long-term growth potential. By taking direct control, brands can optimize their listings, leverage Amazon’s full-funnel marketing tools, and build lasting customer relationships. Resellers dilute brand equity—owning your Amazon channel is the key to sustainable success. The key to long-term success? Cutting out resellers and selling direct.Here’s why:
- Brand Control & Consistency – Resellers create inconsistent branding, poor product listings, and pricing issues that damage brand equity.
- Listing Authority & Account Health – Brands can’t fully optimize listings without direct control, and inactive seller accounts risk suspension.
- Data & Insights – Selling through resellers limits access to conversion rates, customer feedback, and other valuable insights.
- Advertising & Growth Potential – Amazon’s DSP, AMC, and Connected TV offer powerful top-of-funnel marketing tools—only fully leveraged by brands selling direct.
Selling direct requires operational changes, but the benefits outweigh the risks. By embracing Amazon as a primary growth channel rather than a secondary reseller-driven platform, brands can fully control their narrative, pricing, and customer relationships—ensuring sustained success in the evolving eCommerce landscape.
Brand Degradation
For years, decades even, enterprise and B2B brands have ignored Amazon as a sales channel, leaving it to their distributors, dealers and retailers to leverage it as an indirect sales channel. The end result is a hodge-podge of brand content, poorly optimized listings, degraded product images, and a complete lack of brand continuity. In addition, it becomes a catalog nightmare consisting of duplicate listings, incorrect UPC’s or even brand names, creating mass customer confusion.
Most concerning is the lack of pricing integrity and parity, where resellers list the same products for different prices upsetting your buyers from other sales channels. This often leads to sellers undercutting MAP and running promotions and discounts in an attempt to win the buy box and leverage the power of discounts, leading to heavy backlash from brick-and-mortar retailers who look to Amazon for the true MAP price.
The Way it’s Always Been Done
The solution seems relatively simple: Clean up the Amazon catalog, optimize the product listings, remove the rogue unauthorized resellers, and allow trusted resellers and distributors to continue selling on Amazon as long as they agree to abide by MAP. According to traditional retail economics, this makes perfect sense. There’s just one problem…Amazon is different.
From its inception, Amazon was never designed to be a content management system but a robust e-commerce platform that has evolved from bottom-of-the-funnel demand capture to a full-funnel closed-loop brand building machine. With the introduction of Amazon Demand Side Platform (ADSP), and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), Amazon now boasts the capability of delivering customized Connected TV ads directly to a targeted audience of brand consumers off-Amazon driving top-of-funnel brand awareness with full path to purchase attribution. That’s game-changing.
While innovative startups and challenger brands are seeing this as the greatest opportunity since the advent of television in the 1950s, many legacy brands are failing to realize the full potential of Amazon. Instead, they are simply looking to “continue doing business as usual” with a few minor tweaks along the way.
“We Don’t Want to Sell Direct…”
One of the most common RFP’s that Avenue7Media receives by enterprise brands is to help clean up their Amazon presence: Fix the catalog issues, optimize the listings and build out a beautiful storefront.” Our response is, “Great! We can absolutely do that.” Everything progresses swimmingly until the brand mentions one minor detail, “Oh, and one more thing: We don’t have any plans to sell directly on Amazon ourselves; we’re going to leave that to our resellers…”
Inherent Limitations
Not only does this solution not work, it fails to take full advantage of the opportunity that Amazon now affords. To start, let’s highlight a few of the practical challenges brands face when attempting this strategy, what we at Ave7 call a Growth Limiting Move due to the constraints it puts on the brand once they decide on a course of action that limits their capabilities.
1) Listing Control
Amazon doesn’t allow brands to simply optimize third-party content through a seller central account. Actual listings must be created, and actual offers must often be present in order to “push product content” live to the listing, gaining product detail page control. For brands concerned about making an accidental sale, the obvious solution would simply be to set an exorbitantly high price to avoid winning the buy box (that is, until Amazon issues a violation for price gouging and threatens to take down the listing or suspend the entire account.)
2) Account Health
In addition to the challenge of keeping listings active, keeping the account active can be a severe hurdle for brands that don’t plan to sell products directly. The biggest obstacle is Amazon’s practice of suspending accounts “due to inactivity” (updating content doesn’t count, the Amazon bots and algorithms need to see actual product sales flowing through the account).
3) Visibility & Insight
When all of a brand’s sales go through its resellers, the brand ultimately loses visibility into the most important metrics the platform has to offer. This includes the listing conversion rate, share of voice, ad spend, rate of returns and return reasons, and access to buyer-seller messages sent by consumers that can contain valuable insight into customer experience and product feedback (which can ultimately lead to product improvements and necessary iterations.)
Even with optimized content, allowing multiple authorized resellers to continue selling on Amazon can cause ongoing issues, including detail page control, MAP battles between resellers, and a combined inability of all resellers to accurately forecast inventory and sales due to sharing the buy box between multiple resellers. This is especially true of consumable products where products reach an expiration date forcing sellers to recall inventory if they are unable to sell before the projected best-by dates.
The Greatest Challenge
The good news is that there is a solution that not only overcomes most of the limitations of the reseller model, but also includes ancillary benefits for the brand. Are you ready for it?…
Cut off all of your resellers and sell direct to customers on the Amazon platform
Yes, it’s an extreme statement and one that comes with knee-jerk reactions from the most seasoned brands that ultimately culminate with, “There’s absolutely no way we can do that.” I understand that this is a lot to take in and requires a holistic change not only in mindset and approach, but impacts the entire business all the way down to how a company operates from a financial and logistical position. So before we get into the benefits of this new strategy, let’s cover the most common challenges brands face that prevent them from making the pivot from a strictly B2B, to a hybrid B2C organization.
The Fear of Upsetting Resellers/Distributors
Most enterprise brands have a very simple reason they want to allow their resellers and dealers to sell on Amazon: They don’t want to upset them and they don’t want the headache. In some cases this approach has actually been formalized with agreements to allow the dealers to continue selling. But in 99% of all cases, the distributors and resellers aren’t doing the brand any favors. In almost every case we see, resellers are focused on executing the bare minimum requirements in terms of investment, whether it be in listing quality, advertising spend or customer experience, all in exchange for an easy sale from an Amazon customer.
The goal of most resellers is simply to capitalize on existing brand search volume, historical reviews of the product, and current sales velocity. At the end of the day, why should they make the investment to improve brand awareness, customer experience or product improvement?
In many cases, the brands are handicapped not by logistics but fear… They’re afraid that if they don’t allow their distributors and resellers to continue selling on Amazon, then they won’t continue to sell their products in brick and mortar. Fortunately, this is usually a bluff, and the majority of sellers fall into one of two categories:
- 99% of their sales come from Amazon, and they’ve become an unnecessary middleman, buying products wholesale and turning around to list them on Amazon at retail price.
- A relatively small percentage of their sales come from Amazon, and no retailer in their right mind would give up a good product that customers love and generate revenue in their brick and mortar retail or distribution chain.
In nearly every case we’ve experienced, clients who have cut off resellers (who in turn stopped placing orders) have always been able to recoup those sales directly on Amazon themselves.
The Competitive Advantage
More importantly however is something that most brands never consider, and that is the benefit that removing resellers can have on the resellers off-Amazon sales. We’ll dive more into this when we talk about the benefits, but the bottom line is: effectively building your brand on Amazon will positively impact sales across all channels, including brick and mortar (instead of cannibalizing other sales channels as some brands often fear).
Common Objections
In addition there are a few common objections we get from brand owners suddenly faced with the decision to cut off their resellers:
- “Our dealers/distributors are really good at this” (but are they adding value?)
- “That’s just not our business model” (in which case it may be time for a change…)
Regardless of how good distributors may be at selling on Amazon, the reason they’re so eager to continue selling is because once you have the team, technology and playbooks in place, it’s relatively easy to capture passive sales. In regards to updating your business model, while it may require some changes in mindset and new logistics practices, it may not be as difficult as you think, especially when utilizing a strategic partner that can do all of the heavy lifting for you. Before you make a decision, take into consideration these two facts highlighted by Amazon:
- Brands that sell directly tend to perform better than brands that sell through resellers
- Brands that use a Managed Service Provider perform dynamically better than brands that attempt to do it on their own and take care of Amazon in-house.
The reason is simple: Success on Amazon requires expert knowledge across multiple verticals (including advertising, logistics, creative, etc) supporting technology as well as established playbooks to handle everything from catalog issues to product launches and more. A well equipped service provider like Avenue7Media has the ability to act as a brands fully outsourced Amazon department, acting as an extension of your team, at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full team in-house and piecemealing playbooks and technology together.
Choosing to Go Direct
While it can entail some uncertainties, and challenges and obstacles, choosing to sell direct is unequivocally the greatest decision a B2B brand can make, by owning and controlling their brand equity on a platform that accounts more than 50% of all eCommerce sales and is the starting point of 60-75% of all product searches. In effect, Amazon is not simply a channel, Amazon is the channel, and one whose impact will help to determine the fate of most brands 5-10 years down the line.
Now that we’ve covered the challenges of continuing to utilize the reseller model, let’s look at some of the competitive advantages that a brand has access to as a result of going direct.
1) Aggregated Data
Fully owning the Amazon channel enables brands to aggregate all of the incredible product insights, customer demographics and data essential for guiding the business. This includes everything from conversion rates, customer questions and return reasons which can all lead to necessary improvements for the listing but also improvements to the product itself. In addition, it removes the challenge of “lag” data, allowing brands to spot changes in sales immediately instead of 2-3 months later when a reseller places their next order or reports on prior quarter sales.
2) Increased Control
In addition to increased insight, being the exclusive seller of products on Amazon enables increased control of product detail pages, brand content and product pricing. This allows for better brand continuity, and enables a brand to utilize brand registry to gain and maintain product detail page control, instead of constantly battling reseller contributions that can revert listings even with the utilization of brand registry. Selling direct also allows brands to control and maintain price parity with off-Amazon sales channels, including coordinating discounts for tentpole events such as Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
3) Full Funnel Advertising
One of the most important benefits however is the ability, for the first time in history, to run full funnel closed loop advertising at scale. The opportunity is so new that some brands aren’t even aware it exists, but with the expansion of Amazon DSP, Amazon Marketing Cloud and Amazon Connected TV, brands have the ability to exponentially increase their reach by targeting their specific customer groups (which you can only get with the aggregated advertising data), with custom creative providing full path-to-purchase visibility and the most effective way to go up funnel and build brand awareness in a way that positively impacts your business as a whole.
What are the Risks of not Making this Change?
Brands that fail to acknowledge the shifting landscape and make the necessary changes run the risk of having their competitors make the change first, resulting in a loss of market share. In dormant categories where few if any brands fail to make the necessary pivots, all of them run the risk of emerging challenger brands entering the marketplace with a clear strategic focus and an ability to disrupt even the most established businesses by leveraging the opportunity now available.
Where Do I Start?
Yes, there are challenges to selling direct on Amazon, but that’s where Avenue7Media shines… Instead of trying to figure this out yourself, our team of experts are capable of helping brands navigate this internal shift, providing the necessary support, resources and insights to make this critical but necessary change. As an established eCommerce solution provider, and part of Amazon’s Service Provide Network, we partner with brands to make the necessary changes that will pave the way for future growth and protect the integrity and equity that brands have fought so hard to build.
If you would like to learn more about how Avenue7Media can help you transform your business, reach out today to speak with a member of our team. As a true strategic partner, we look forward to helping you grow and protect your brand as we navigate the exciting changes coming in 2025 and beyond.
