Ryan Daniel Moran explains why Amazon selling got harder: more competition, tougher reviews, and Amazon cracking down on gray-hat tactics. He says the fix is building a real brand for a specific customer, not just white-labeling generic products, and owning an audience you can drive to Amazon yourself.
So I just want to make a video for those of you who sell on Amazon.com because.
I have like this frustration that I'm just seeing in the marketplace right now, where I see it kind of building and boiling because things are changing and we've got to be real about this. So for those of you who sell physical products on Amazon, I know that most of you got into this because you bought amazing selling machine or you bought something from Rapid Crush or you joined the tribe or you bought.
Some other e commerce training. And three years ago, the marketplace was way different than it is now. And no one likes to talk about it. No one likes to talk about the increased competition, the pricing wars, how much harder reviews are getting. And my. I said this on Kevin Reiser's podcast two years ago and I will still say it now. The thing that surprises me is all of this seller's resistance to the change. I'm really surprised at the lack of.
Maturity of the businesses that are selling, particularly on Amazon, and they're selling like it's still 2014, 2015. Right. Rather than like it is 2018. And what we are seeing is what I call the consolidation, this consolidation of big brands winning. And by big brands, I mean people who have been there since 2015, 2016, who got into a competitive space, owned the space and are defending that position.
And people not as able to carve into those markets. And so what we see happen is we see price profit margins starting to get squeezed. We're starting to see blasts and giveaways not work as well. We see Amazon cracking down on more gray and black hat strategies. And.
I'm making this video for like the 10% of you who are willing to play the game differently and will therefore win at the E Comm game. And the way that you win the E Comm game is that you don't. You don't just try and capture what is in the pie. There's a, like, there's an important piece to that. Capturing as much of the pie as you can is important. But the way that you make the pie bigger is two ways. One, you have got to lean on where you are different. If you are white labeling the same thing from Alibaba, the same supplement from some manufacturer that 10 of your competitors are also selling.
There's only so many sleep aids to be sold. Unless you are different, what is it that makes you stand out, that makes you different? Because the idea behind having a brand, particularly one that you can sell, is that you carve out some semblance of the market and you make them love you. And those people don't go away. If you're just going after Sleep Aid buyers.
What else are you going to sell those people? That makes it really hard to build a business and to build a brand. But if you are different and you're serving a person, which is kind of our pivot point into the other thing that makes you stand out, if you have a difference, you can command your own profit margins. You can always be ahead of your competitors. You always have a head start on the marketplace. And then the second thing that you have got to do in 2018 and beyond, and this will not change for the next 10 years.
If we could go. If I could predict one thing that won't change, it's this and that. Your secret sauce is your audience. Look, it used to be the case that Amazon had no big competition. So the way that you won was you came out with a good enough product, you blasted it to high heaven with giveaways, you ranked for keywords, you gamed reviews, and you held on to that position as long as you could.
It's not the way the game is played anymore. Those tools have a place in the overall promotion process. But if you don't have a group of people that you're serving that you can speak to directly, pull a lever and send them to Amazon, you are on really thin ice. Because you're going to have those sleepless nights of Amazon kicking you off, of somebody nipping at your heels with reviews, leaving negative reviews on your page, competitors outspending you out, advertising you, selling for lower profit margins. And you're just gonna wonder, man, where did all the good days go?
The game is not getting harder, it's just changing. And it will always change. Your job is to continue being different and to continue serving your people, serving your customers. That's how you win. Always and forever and ever. Amen. And the tactics will change. The opportunities, the niches, the trends, they will all change. And you've got to change with them. But if you're playing the game the way that it worked in 2014, you are going to get beat. And I worry about those people. I worry about those of you who are in that space. So I get asked a lot. Is it too late? Is there too much competition? And to them, I like to point to certain examples. Is the supplement space too competitive? Yes, if you are selling plain old vitamin D, plain old sleep aids, plain old melatonin, whatever. But my buddy here in town, Aubrey Marcus, has a really cool supplement company called Onnit. Because they're different and because they have a very, very defined target audience. We did that at sheer strength. We do that. My other companies, it's your job to define who you serve, not just what you sell. And then go get those people and bring them to Amazon and then those people leave reviews. So all the other people on Amazon buy from you too. Amazon's a tool in your tool belt. And if you are just flying blind, hoping to suck some life out of that marketplace, your days are numbered. Only so many people can win at that game. This is about creating things. It's about bringing value. It's about creating value for a group of people, not just selling and hawking products. So if you are willing to change the way that you've been playing the game, you can still absolutely crush it. Just. And this month, three of our students got multi million dollar checks for selling their business. One of them broke the record. Previous record was a check for $19.7 million for the sale of their company. Someone just broke that. I probably shouldn't say that deal's not 100% done.
So there's so much opportunity to be had if you're willing to play the game like it's today and not like it is three years ago. This is what we work on with our backroom students.
My group mentoring program. Always staying ahead, always trying new things, always refining your systems and your team. But if you are just trying to hawk a product, you are going to have a really hard time. That game only works for so long. All right, look, there's still massive opportunity out there rooting for you. If we've never met before, you can subscribe to my podcast. It's called Freedom Fastlane, and I do rants like this every once in a while. Best of luck to you. There's still so like, things are expanding. So Amazon's bigger than it was four years ago. There are more customers and easier to get to them. There are more tools. There's things like Zipify Pages, which didn't exist a few years ago. There's things like Click Funnels, which didn't exist a few years ago. There's so much more available to you if you are willing to keep on driving. And that's your job, to keep driving, keep creating, keep serving people. And that's how you win. So stay ahead of the game, keep inventing, keep driving, keep creating. That's who gets ahead in this world.
Good Sam.
