WARNING: Amazon Sellers are about to get crushed in 2022...

I think 2022 is going to be a tough year for a lot of Amazon sellers.

Because we're dealing with sort of a perfect storm that could punch a lot of Amazon sellers in the mouth. This is the year that is going to make or break a lot of people who sell on Amazon. And in this video, we're going to talk about this perfect storm that's coming and what you can do to weather the storm.

The first thing that I think we're going to see in 2022 is a massive amount of suspensions. On Amazon.com we saw this past year, Amazon make announcements that things that were kosher a few years ago are not okay moving forward. And that includes things like two step URLs or really doing anything in order to juice up your bestseller rank and get higher keyword rankings. Now, this used to be all that Amazon sellers did, myself included. We did everything we could in order to rank for keywords because that's where all the organic traffic lived. But now Amazon says that those things aren't okay. And in the past, Amazon has retroactively gone back and banned people for things that they did in the past. That's scary. If Amazon does that, pretty much every Amazon seller right now should be really scared, should be really concerned that their account is no longer in good standing because of things that they did in the past. Now, even if Amazon doesn't go back and ban people for what they did in the past, there will still be Amazon sellers who are doing things that way. And I think as a result, Amazon is going to bring down the hammer on a lot of those sellers, which is going to kick a lot of people out of the marketplace, even sellers who are doing millions of dollars right now. The second thing that's gonna happen in 2022 is that the supply chain bottleneck is going to start to get cleared. Now, on the surface, this sounds like really good news, except when you have a bunch of sellers who are selling on Amazon.com, suddenly get flooded with inventory, what do you think is going to happen? You're going to see a scramble for people to get their placements back, to get their key keyword rankings back for them to fulfill their orders. And I think you might see downward pressure on prices. Ooh, Amazon's already kind of a price war game. So what happens when people start dropping their price in order to keep inventory moving so they can place the next order and get things back to normal? You might see even more of a squeeze on profit margin, which is going to really hurt the people who have been playing the price war game up to this point, point, those who are trying to win on volume rather than brand, might start to get squeezed out of the marketplace because you have such downward pressure, such cheap product entering the marketplace from a variety of different places. And the third thing that is going to happen in 2022 is that people will give up. As you see Amazon get more competitive with price wars happening and you see suspensions happening and even the aggregators that are buying up all these businesses now stuck with these businesses that, that can't sell anything, I think you will see people give up and you will see E commerce sellers say, well, no money on Amazon anymore. And you will see aggregators go, well, I guess our thesis was broken that along with inflation being at the highest rate it's been in 40 years now, it doesn't even make sense to sell product anymore. Now that will be the story that a lot of people will say. But I'm always looking at where the backdoor opportunity is. And I think that as a result of some of these challenges that happen in the year 2020, we create what you might call a new wide open west, period. You see, we already are starting to see new entrepreneurs overlook E commerce. They're now looking into other opportunities. They're looking at Defi and crypto and software as a service and not E commerce, not selling physical stuff. So when you have people getting suspended and you have the appearance of low profit margins and you see people giving up, you have less competition starting to enter into the marketplace. Which means that brands who have done things well are about to have their best years ever. Brands that have solidified their place in the marketplace, but by giving great customer experiences, by building audiences, by creating partnerships, by having high profit margins because they're targeted to a specific person rather than just trying to maximize their sales on Amazon. Those brands, the ones who have been doing what we've been talking about here on the channel for like the last 900 years, they're about to have their best year ever. Now, you might be wondering at this point, all right, well, I haven't been listening for the last 900 years and I, I am starting something new. Is there still opportunity in E Commerce, particularly on Amazon in 2022? And here I am saying, yeah, it might be the best year ever to start because now you have all these established sellers who have been used to it being a certain way for like the last six years who are now starting to go away, get punted off, lose their profit margin and say, what the ache do we do now? But those of you who are new to the space, who are building real brands, have a new opportunity to carve out your space and still win on the biggest marketplace in the world. Only this time, there's more inventory for ads, there's more demand on Amazon than ever before. There's more audiences that want to partner with brands. Valuations and capital are everywhere. They're super high right now. So that means that there are more resources for the E commerce seller. But I think we're about to have less competition than we've had since like 2016.

When I first started teaching e commerce, I was helping Amazon sellers get started and I told them that there was about an 18 month window back in like 2014 in which you'd have this wide open west period. And during that wide open west period, you could put up any product and it would sell and you could rank for keywords easily and you could do all this stuff that you can't do anymore in order to incentivize reviews and stand out from competition. And then I said there would be a consolidation period and we've seen that play out over the last several years where buyers are coming up and buying all of these brands and you're seeing prices get squeezed down and people run for the hills away from competition. And then I said that after the consolidation period there would be a breaking point to be breakage in the system which would give way to another wide open west. I believe that that is where we are right now. We are at breaking point. We are seeing where there's been so much capital put into aggregators and people who will buy any business and you see the maximum amount of sellers selling the exact same thing at the same price, competing for reviews, where that is starting to break. And that is going to give way for a brand new period, a brand new golden age for real entrepreneurs to come in and compete again. Which means 2022 is an awesome year for people who are just starting in E commerce. So how do you do that in today's competitive climate? How do you establish yourself as a brand and not just a seller like everybody else? There's a couple of things you need to keep in mind today more than ever. Your back end follow up is more important than the front end. I used to teach this in workshops and I would say to people that your pivot point from going from being a product business to being a brand is what happens after the sale, what types of follow ups are you doing with your customers, what types of inserts Are you putting in your packaging? What are you doing in order to give your customers such a world class experience that they have to come back and buy from you on your website or follow you on social media because they prefer you over everybody else? Hardly anyone who sells on Amazon is thinking about that stuff. They're mostly thinking about things like, well, what if I offer another one for free? Or I do a free warranty or a free ebook that no one's ever going to read. It's all transactional, it's not brand building at all. But if you can think about what the customer life cycle is going to be over the next year versus what it's going to be over the next week until they leave you a review, you will win and you'll be able to spend more on advertising and you will be able to sponsor more influencers and you'll be able to run more traffic to drive people to Amazon, which is where they want to buy and create an amazing experience for them and market and monetize them on the back end after the purchase. You have to be thinking about your customer interacting with you a year from now in order for you to think about a brand instead of just selling product. The second thing that's more important than ever is the story off of Amazon. Do you have a legitimate presence on some platform? And I don't care if it's TikTok or Instagram or a blog or a podcast, like we have to stop being so romantic about the platform. It's really about you caring about who the target market is for your brand and you telling a compelling story to get them involved in your brand. Kind of the classic sort of example for this is just, can you make your customer the hero in the story if you did nothing else but you told a story about your customers on any social media platform or blog or podcast and you made them the hero where you told their story and how your product was part of their journey, that's enough. But what most people are doing is just posting about their product, trying to make the product look cool. And that's okay for an ad once in a while. It's okay for an email or one piece of content once in a while. But it's terrible for a brand to make people really fall in love with your business to the point where they want to pay a premium price, tell their friends and come back and buy more. You've got to make your entire business about the the customer. Not about what your product does for the customer, just about the customer. When you can do that, people will find you and choose you and pay higher prices regardless of where you are for sale. And right now there's such an opportunity on Amazon for high priced premium brands. This gets missed in all of the conversations that people are having about E commerce because they're thinking about how to game the algorithm and and get more reviews rather than how to build a great business. But you can do a better job for your customer if you've got really healthy profit margins. So you coming in as a premium brand in whatever space, whether it's beauty or supplements or food or kayaks, there is a higher demand today for higher priced brands than there has ever been. Whereas most people are competing for the scraps. There are benefits to being the cheap, cheapest product in the marketplace and there are benefits to being the most expensive. There are very few benefits to being right in the middle or being second cheapest. That just gets you lost in a crowd. And my advice would be to start with the goal of being the premium brand in your space so that you have the capital and the margin to do an amazing job for your target customer. I received a text message from a friend of mine who just sold his business for about $20 million. And I met this person when he was doing about a million dollars a year. He was following my work and my podcast started the entire journey with my free content. I know that's a lot of you, by the way. I only hear about you guys after you crossed the million. I wish you reached out much earlier so I could support you guys. But I did receive this text message from a friend of mine who was a client and a customer and got this $20 million offer on his business. I'm so excited for him. And I'm just gonna pull up the text here. He Sundays, we got nine offers on the business. Our banker said it was the most competitive process he's run this year. You know why? Because we did it right. We built a brand, a real brand with a real customer and a mission, et cetera. I listened from day one when you said build a real brand, not an Amazon brand. Some of you who are watching this are thinking, ryan, you've said this a thousand times. I'm like, yeah, are you doing it yet? Because the people who are doing this building real brands make tens of millions of dollars. It's why our curriculum in one of our programs is called Eight figure Exit, because it's what clients get when they build real brands. They build seven figure businesses that they can sell and they have eight figure exits. Meanwhile, everybody else is competing for the scraps on Amazon. That is going to come to a head in 2022, when people finally just give up, and all that's going to be left are real brands. And if you are watching this and you are like, damn it, it's finally time. You're in a really good spot to be able to do this well, to do this right. Go put your head down for four or five years and go build a ridiculously awesome brand. There's gonna be two camps this year. There's gonna be those who kill it on Amazon and those whose businesses get killed on Amazon. So I hope that you are one of the ones who are killing it. And if we can be a resource for you, we consider it a privilege. There's resources for in the description of this video. Thanks for watching.