Leading Ecommerce In An 80-Year-Old Company with Liliana Molina of Aqua Lung - Episode 84

FINDING THE RIGHT SPACE FOR AMAZON

 

DESCRIPTION

Aqua Lung Ecommerce Manager, Liliana Molina is on the show today! Across her career, Liliana gained vast search engine optimization knowledge in digital marketing roles which she was able to leverage later on, as her position evolved in Ecommerce and working in the Amazon marketplace. Working with Aqua Lung brought on many challenges for Liliana and she’s here today to tell us all about how she managed to overcome them. Tune in to find out more about Liliana’s journey!

Besides spending over eight years in digital marketing and SEO, Liliana focused on the elective health-care industry, working with plastic and cosmetic surgeons. Although a very interesting field, Liliana was looking for something that would be a better fit for her lifestyle. As she began learning more about Ecommerce, Liliana eventually opened her own consultancy company, helping small businesses to launch their e-commerce platforms. While doing that, she was given the opportunity to work with the sportswear brand, SKLZ, supporting their Ecommerce team with their merchandising, forecasting, and campaigns. After about eight months, she left SKLZ to work for Aqua Lung where she managed to tackle a lot of challenges.

“Something that I’m watching right now is how influencer marketing will change, and how you can take advantage of that if you’re not selling on your own B2C platform and you want to drive traffic to Amazon.”
— Liliana Molina

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Liliana talks about her career history, explains how she got into Aqua Lung, and how she shifted from pure digital marketing to Ecommerce and the Amazon marketplace.

  • Liliana explains what account management with Amazon entails.

  • Soon after Liliana came on board with Aqua Lung, the account manager who handled Amazon quit, and the position remained open for about six months. So their Amazon account remained totally inactive for about six months.

  • Aqua Lung is a company that has been in existence for eighty years. They traditionally sell to stores and they have many independent stores in their network, so their Amazon account is very different.

  • There are some new competitors to Aqua Lung who are exclusive digital brands and they have never sold in retail stores.

  • Liliana talks about the distribution challenges that Aqua Lung was experiencing when she first started working there.

  • Changing to a 3P business model.

  • Making the decision to move some products to 3P and leave others on 1P.

  • Working with a law firm specializing in marketplaces and e-commerce to help clean up and remove all the unauthorized sellers.

  • Going through operational changes, they found that the operational side of seller central was a bit complicated.

  • Liliana explains why they had to be very strategic about the partners that they chose when making their operational changes.

  • Liliana talks about one of her biggest challenges with Amazon, moving forward.

  • Looking at trends that could become bigger in the future.

  • Walmart and Target as Amazon's competitors.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

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