The Death of the Category: Winning on Amazon and other Ecommerce Marketplaces
Tags: Ecommerce, Marketplaces, Business, Data, Amazon

The Death of the Category: Winning on Amazon and other Ecommerce Marketplaces

How brands should be optimizing their products on Amazon and across ecommerce platforms Mission Follow Feb 18 · 3 min read

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

What if I told you that you may be approaching Amazon in all the wrong ways? Many brands, especially more established ones who started out in brick and mortar, have been playing a game of catch-up while trying to quickly figure out how to sell on Amazon and win. But it may feel like a confusing place to win. Especially if a brand is trying to apply a brick-and-mortar sales approach, like winning a category, to online platforms like Amazon, Target, or Walmart.

But we all love a good underdog story, which is why I invited Andrea Leigh to the show to share her secrets.

Andrea is the VP of Strategy & Insights at Ideoclick, a full-service ecommerce optimization platform. Before Ideoclick, she spent nearly a decade working for Amazon, so she is coming to the table with a true insider’s view and strategies in her back pocket that she’s seen work on Amazon and other marketplaces.

“As Amazon became bigger and bigger, not only did it become more important to the manufacturers’ business, but it started to become a little unwieldy in terms of how to be successful, how to make sure your products stand out, and how to negotiate and operate,” Leigh said. “With such a big player, that’s so unique and looks so different from brick and mortar, which is what most manufacturers have been really accustomed to for so many years. And so Ideoclick was really born out of that to help manufacturers navigate these waters.”

One of the prescriptions Leigh gives is that brands need to shed their connection with categories if they want to see success online. CPG brands used to being top dogs in the brick-and-mortar space and №1 in their category are struggling to understand why they are not seeing similar results when customers are searching for products online.

“We had a manufacturer come to us and say, “I’m like the number two or three bottled water brand in the world, and so I should be number two in my category on Amazon.” And there are a number of reasons why that thinking is a little bit out of date or flawed.”

Leigh explained that wrapping your head around the answer is the first step to start competing where you want to.

“The concept of a brick and mortar category totally makes sense if a customer is going to a store, they’re going down an aisle, they’re presented with bottled water, they choose from what’s available to them, and then they move on to shop at a different category,” Leigh said. “But eCom customers don’t shop that way. The category is dynamic, it’s continually evolving, shaped around that customer and what they’ve specifically looked at when retailers are using automation and personalization. And so you can’t really apply that same mental model to ecommerce. You have to really think about that entire competitive set.”

Understanding how ecommerce consumers shop is just step one, though. You also need to figure out where those consumers are shopping so that you know where to spend your money, who you’re competing against on the platform, and what you need to do to win share of search and market share.

“There’s certainly no perfect answer to how do you think across the different eCom platforms, but I do think it’s important to really think about, where’s your customer?” Leigh said. “Is your customer shopping on Walmart, Target, and Amazon? Most of them are because most of them are cross-shopping. Where else is your customer shopping? What category-specific players should be really important to you? And then where are you most profitable? And where can you get a good ROI? And what platform do you use for what?”

Ultimately, there are a lot of questions brands need to be asking and answering to succeed in the wild west of ecommerce. To hear some more of what Leigh suggests, tune in to her episode of Up Next in Commerce, here.

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