Protecting Your Brand From Resellers on Amazon - Episode 199

INTERVIEW WITH MAYA CROTHERS

DESCRIPTION

Beauty & Personal Care is among six top retail categories on Amazon and that is why today we’re joined by Maya Crothers, who is the Founder & CEO of Circcell Skincare.

Her previous professional experience includes working in energy generation and strategy consulting with Bain & Company. She and her husband are personally interested in the work of the Aspen Institute in the area of criminal justice reform. Through her company, Maya has worked with the Nest Foundation to fight the human trafficking of children in the US. Maya recently moved to Aspen from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and she enjoys all the mountains have to offer with her husband and two teenage children.

Make sure you tune in to find out more!

“It’s just a very complicated ecosystem. Get someone that knows what they’re doing to help you with Amazon from day one.”

— Maya Crothers

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Amazon has two platforms, they have a Vendor Central platform, where you have a traditional wholesale relationship with Amazon, and they purchase a product from you, they sell it and fulfill it. There's also a Seller Central platform, which is a marketplace, where you list your products, and you are controlling the advertising and the sales. When the orders come in, you can fulfill those orders yourself (FBM), or you can use Amazon's fulfillment (FBA) program to do that.

Sometimes it is possible to shut the resellers down, but most of the time it is not because Amazon wants a very competitive marketplace.
One of the ways to take control over resellers is to be really careful about who you wholesale to. It's really important upfront to know who your partners are, and make sure you're not distributing products to the wrong types of organizations.
Some brands work it into their wholesale contracts, or reseller contracts and have specific clauses to say you agree to not sell their products on Amazon, Walmart or wherever you're selling.
Prevention is better than a cure with resellers.
Try to be very careful throughout the entire lifecycle of a product to make sure that it doesn't get into the wrong hands.

The problem with resellers is getting worse as you get bigger.
In the eyes of the law, and with Amazon, there's nothing wrong with reselling or retailing products that you've acquired legitimately. But it is illegal and certainly, Amazon cares very deeply about it as well around counterfeiting. Ultimately, that erodes customer trust in their platform.
Having a weak listing is like having your products on a shelf and they're dusty and unorganized. That's your face to hundreds of millions of people, so your listing has to look really good. Even if you don't consider Amazon to be an important channel strategically, it's really important to have good listings and good reviews because people are going to look for you there.
Other brands can buy your brand name as a keyword or your product name, so if you're not actively trying to buy that keyword, someone else is going to, and your brand is going to get cannibalized.
Circcell Skincare uses almost to the level of clean biotech ingredients, types of ingredients you would expect to get from a doctor's or a dermatologist brand. Circcell uses clays, mechanicals, and essential oils, so the formulations kind of look and feel like natural formulations. They started trying to up their sustainability game, and they switched all of their cleansers and toners packaging to PCR packaging.

Protecting Your Brand From Resellers on Amazon - Episode 199

INTERVIEW WITH MAYA CROTHERS

DESCRIPTION

KEY TAKEAWAYS

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE