How To Scale & Win With AMAZON?
AMAZON will be a force to reckon with in retail with its relentless focus on customers (obsession with customers) and their ability to invent at scale. In order to maximize digital opportunity, it is imperative to win with Amazon. The following picture taken from amazon jobs clearly articulates their values (top principle)
This edit is an approach for any seller on AMAZON, be it a brand, manufacturer, private label supplier, or even a reseller to understand the various inputs that go into winning in the AMAZON world and thereby create a strategy and execution to increase the probability of winning. What is very interesting is, when you align your process with such a company that has a laser-sharp focus on customers, you will win in every other retailer with the same process (as long as you are relevant to the context of the retailer).
Let us dive in.
To win with AMAZON, you need to win with Customers.
What does this mean?
To understand this deeper, we need to get into the brain behind the AMAZON search algorithm, it is called The A9 algorithm. Once we understand this, we can get into how you can plan your business to maximize the probability of getting more eyeballs and eventually more business. Looking at the history of the development of A9 (courtesy: wiki) A9 was created by Amazon.com in 2003 as an independent company aimed at producing technology for search and advertising. They moved into the building previously used by the DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California. One purpose of A9.com was to leverage algorithms, and the name was chosen as a numeronym to represent that word (i.e. ‘A’ + 9 other letters).
# Unboxing the A9 Algorithm
What exactly is Amazon’s A9 algorithm?
In a nutshell, it is the name of Amazon’s search engine algorithm. It is the strategy that lies behind Amazon’s search box, which decides what product recommendations to show the consumer. It is based on data from thousands of search queries that have been made on the platform.
What are the components/parameters which go into the algorithm?
The underlying theme is simple.
Imagine you’re working as a member of staff in a retail showroom on a ‘commission only’ basis. When a customer comes into your store via a recommendation from a friend or family member, they are more likely to ask for you, based on your excellent track record of sales and product knowledge that you provided to your first initial contact. As a result of this recommendation, you have now ended up with two sales. A9 is no different. The more you sell on Amazon or show indications of that, the more Amazon will increase your visibility and the higher you will rank. (courtesy marketplace amp)
A9, like google search, is a continuously evolving algorithm but the fundamentals remain consistent. Two key fundamentals are,
a) Relevance: Amazon shows the most relevant products to the user query and
b) Performance: If a product has a good or high sales record, it will be ranked at the top in the Amazon search results.
Now that you know what all go into the algorithm, as a seller, what can you do improve the odds of winning?
# How To Transform The Odds Of Winning?
Please note all the factors in the above diagram (both direct and indirect) are relative to the market. Without you understanding your relative stand and what makes some products win and some do not, you will be simply experimenting and may be wasting time and scarce resources. It is humanly not possible to take decisions by observing manually that to snapshots of the retailer.
The solution here is to use technology to understand the market around your propositions and relative to your brand.In fashion and lifestyle business, there is one more complication. Looking at what is happening in a platform may not necessarily give you inputs to win in that market as consumers are constantly getting updated with trends from all over the world. In other words, winning in AMAZON in fashion and lifestyle needs a constant update of,
1. What is winning in AMAZON in your target market?
2. What is winning in the inspirational global market relevant to your proposition? Stylumia‘s Market Intelligence Solution (MIT) is designed to provide you necessary insights from (1) and (2) relevant to your proposition and target market in a near-real-time fashion. This enables you to be on the ball with your customers and do not miss Relevance and constantly impact Performance. Our clients cut across brands, retailers, exporters, manufacturers, private label sellers use Stylumia MIT to make informed decisions on product, imagery, content to delight their consumers and increase their revenue upwards of 30-60% and becoming priority sellers with the retailer.
The areas where Stylumia MIT enables the odds of maximizing opportunity with A9 algorithm are detailed in the info-graphic below.
Hope you got a comprehensive view of how AMAZON’s customer obsession is reflecting in their A9 algorithms which match makes the product to customers. You also have a view of how Stylumia MIT solution can help you transform the odds of winning in this hight competitive and fast-evolving market.
You can also read more about scaling your eCommerce business across market places in our article.
We at Stylumia, are fundamentally solving the demand prediction problem for the fashion and lifestyle industry globally. Apart from CIT, we have other solutions to predict demand quantity for new products (Stylumia APOLLO), New Age Fashion Business Intelligence (Stylumia FIT) for analyzing in-season performance, and Stylumia Store.Y for intelligent distribution, all using proprietary Machine Learning/AI algorithms. A comprehensive view of the fashion supply chain and our solutions are given below.
If you are interested in transforming your business with AMAZON or any other retailer by embedding intelligence in your product decisions, please reach out to us to make your business future-proof and before it is too late.
Blog by Ganesh Subramanian
