Brand Growth Blueprint: Mastering the Amazon Brand Lifecycle

Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host Paul Sonneveld and today we're going to delve into the secrets of successfully establishing and growing a brand on Amazon. I've invited not one but two speakers today, Onno and Steve from RT7 are joining me to share their valuable expertise and perspectives on how to best achieve this. 

Allow me to introduce you to them. So Onno is a Director of Operations and Stephen is the Amazon Strategist at RT7 Digital, an Amazon consultancy with proven expertise across industry verticals. Their mission is to help your brand grow by increasing your business interactions in the rapidly growing B2C sector. 

Now, Onno has a background in science and experience as a Management Consultant and Program Director and he's dedicated to developing businesses and helping clients grow. Stephen on the other hand, has a background in robotics and has worked at Amazon for over 10 years He's very data-driven and has a wealth of experience in the Amazon landscape and specializes in developing bespoke and effective strategies Thank you both for being on the show. It's great to have you.

Onno Huyser
Thanks Paul. It's great to be here and good afternoon, evening, and morning to everyone else in the world who's joined us today. 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, we are coming from lots of different locations. I think Steve is based in the UK. Oh, no, I think you're in South Africa and I am based in Melbourne so, a nice global spread. I thought maybe today to kick us off, I wanted to ask maybe with you, Stephen, just take us through how Amazon has really changed in the last few years. Especially with the start of Covid and then of course, coming through that. Let's have a great place to just start a conversation today.

Stephen Lloyd
Sure. I'll probably keep it to some of the highlights as a lot has changed on Amazon over a few years. I can probably take up the whole session going through the different areas in which they've kind of changed and done things and Covid definitely had a very big impact. If you were on the Amazon Vendor program throughout the time of Covid, you would've seen things like the direct fulfillment program being temporarily shut off. You'd have seen storage limits being put into F B A, something that they've continued to put a lot more weight behind in terms of storage limits going forward. 

Since then, Covid was a point where Amazon was very reactionary. It wasn't something that they had majorly planned for, and they acted in a way that Amazon often does, which is to shut down everything immediately and then deal with the consequences if they ever get around to it. So where it's kind of gone since then and where is effectively trying to get themselves back on track to where they wanted to be with their roadmap and plans, and what that's kind of meant is a lot stricter, clamping down with more rules. So, brand registry becoming a far more dominant thing on the platform now.

If you've got a vendor account, you'll have seen brand registry becoming a requirement across the board for things that previously you didn't need. And things like transparency, which has been such a big thing that Amazon's pushing, as you saw a news thing on Amazon this morning, that they're actually offering vendor accounts, a free thing with transparency. It's become a very big thing for them to push on. 

But the market itself has also shifted. We're seeing, we saw over the point of Covid that brands that were popular brands tended to dominate. That's become a little bit less true. I think going forward there's been more opportunity to kind of grow exactly where 2023 will land as a marketplace landscape is kind of yet to be seen as race still halfway through the year. But Amazon as a business has always had its same kind of mentality of how it kind of handles things. They've been working towards, I think, their overall goals of where they want the platform to get to. But Covid was definitely something that kind of rocked the boat on that one. 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that's a great summary, Stephen. And obviously, your perspective of kind of the inside Amazon space here is very, very useful. Now, today we're talking about particularly about brands and how to build brands and I'm really glad to have both of you on the show with me today because you've developed RT7 Digital, quite a unique framework with different stages on how you think about brands. And, before we jump into the different stages, I'd love to just know maybe from you Onno, in terms of how did this framework even come about? Admittedly the first time I've seen such a like lifecycle framework, how did they come about? 

Onno Huyser
Yeah, great question. So we'd love to claim that this is fully homegrown. But the truth is this is really an application of a Traditional Product Maturity Development Lifecycle Model. And in our experience last year, we were looking at a lot of clients that had sort of the jubilee year of 2021 in mind and they were expecting great gains and, and great wins we find it necessary to communicate to them that in fact there is a, a specific kind of journey, that needs to be mapped out on Amazon. 

And even though this model is obviously not perfect and it doesn't take everything into account, what it is, is it helps you think about the stages that you need to progress through in order to achieve, ultimately great success on Amazon. Taking into account some factors like the budget that you have available, the other resources that you have at your disposal, etc. And while looking at the product maturity lifecycle models, we've identified that in the same way, there's probably four phases that we could quite readily identify for the development of a brand on Amazon as well. These four phases are establishments, acceleration. 

Paul Sonneveld
I think I might have some supporting material here as well that you guys have provided which I think are really useful for discussion. So, let's have a look. 

Onno Huyser
Great, thanks. Yeah, so phase one is really the Establishment Phase. It's getting moving. I think a big focus is on retail readiness and research. Really understanding where you're situated in Amazon environments and activating the flywheel. The second phase is taking successes and accelerating them. Really sort of understanding where you can further optimize, defending and growing is when you become more of a target. You've obviously established yourself and you're doing better and better and you wish to grow your overall net position. And then the final stage is something which we all aspire to for all of our clients. And that's really where you're dominating your subcategories. You've got a very high sales rank. You're in a position where you can really optimize, your processes and your products, and your impact, very, very highly. 

Paul Sonneveld
And so, as a brand owner or as a business owner, how do I know I might have been on Amazon for a while, but how do I know what stage I'm in? And sort of working on where I'm at, so I know what the road ahead of me is. 

Onno Huyser
That's a great question. I don't think the model gives you necessarily a clear answer on that, but what we are speculating here is that if your foundations are not in place, then it really doesn't make sense for you to be deploying more advanced tactics. So a very good example would be why are we advertising when our listings are not retail-ready?

This is quite a basic conversation, but we we're often surprised at how we dispute with clients on this, you know, let's advertise now. We'll go, well, you know, is your, is your content optimized? Are you retail-ready? And in fact, in RT7, we have the concept of sort of RT7 retail readiness, which is much more encompassing. So what we are posing here is that you know, look at a model like this. Understand what the key levers are at your stage of development and ask yourself the question, have you got all the foundation blocks in place for you to move on to the next step?

Paul Sonneveld
So can I just wanted to go back to your point around retail readiness, because that's a term I hear a lot. And you mentioned, RT7 readiness or digital readiness. I didn't catch the exact term there, but can you just explain that a little bit more? I mean, as you audit a potential new client, what are the ticks that you are looking for to say, yes, actually you are ready and you're ready to move to a new phase?

Onno Huyser
So when you're initiating a new project on Amazon, one of the key questions is, how suitable are your products in terms of price and desirability in that niche? All too often we'll see clients approaching us where there's simply no activity and demand. You just have only have to look at keyword volumes and you have to look at overall sales in that category to understand that, you know, a large share of something small is. It's not going to excite you. 

So retail readiness is really a much larger concept than just making sure that your PDPs are in good order. It's really about asking, are your products in good order? Do you have the right SKUs? Do you understand the competitive landscape well enough? Is your pricing strategy applicable? That you would because often pricing strategies are imported from elsewhere. You might need to deploy a different strategy on Amazon. So these are the kinds of questions that we're increasingly posing to our clients and asking them to consider these at the launch and establishment stage.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So as we talk about the four stages, and I might just bring it up again, can you talk us through just a little bit more in terms of those four phases and the levers in particular or what your priorities and strategies are on the reach? I'd love to just understand how you work with clients and what you execute under each.

Onno Huyser
So there's quite a diversity of tactics that we would point to. For instance, on the establishment, really the objective there is to gain traction. You want to get up and running and gain traction. So there'll be pieces there on the research. So competitor and product research, and niche analysis which includes pricing. 

If there's product development and selection, that's definitely a question which needs to be posed at that point, rather than just assuming that everything is hunky dory. You've obviously got the pretty traditional keyword research, SEO aspects, and asset creation. But as the algorithm has advanced and developed, we seeing that other aspects are becoming increasingly important. 

So external traction, so external traffic, very important. Need to consider that. External advertising, socials, and then reviews. We know that as the algorithm has adapted over the years, and our job as an agency is to keep up with that. That conversations and topics which weren't as prevalent or important four years ago are actually much more prevalent now.

We look at your stock strategy. So we want to understand are you going following a hybrid route or are you going to be vendor seller, FBM, FBA? We want to understand your brand strategy, and we need to understand how are we going to launch. We've got 180 days ready to get some decent sales velocity and, and really gain traction. So what is it first 180 days look like when we, we are launching fresh? Stephen, anything to add to that?

Stephen Lloyd
No, I think you've covered that well and the first part establishment phase on Amazon is a very key part, and you've got, you do have to have the groundwork set out to be able to then really hit that acceleration phase of it. And if you haven't solidified your establishment and you try to accelerate, it's the classic thing. Or if you don't have your foundation, nothing's going to stay up.  And there, there's a lot to consider when kind of going through that establishment phase. And a brand can have been, could have been around on Amazon for quite a long time and still actually qualify as being in the establishment phase because there's still the groundwork that needs to be done.

As I know mentioned things like the reviews, the sales ranks, and the algorithm has shifted quite a bit in recent years. And Amazon as a platform has always been a risk-averse platform from their own side. And things like the introduction of number of units sold within the last week or month that's now started to appear especially in the mobile side of listings, is Amazon trying to show people you can have confidence x number of people have bought this. 

And even things like when you set up new accounts, the limits and stuff that they put on those accounts are, again, to mitigate against somebody coming on and not meeting the practices and standards. It's all about feeding that algorithm in the beginning so that when you hit that acceleration phase, you've got the foundation to really kick the Amazon flywheel into gear.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. And can I just ask two specific questions that I often get asked about in the establishment phase? Two questions actually. So we'll take them to, what is the role of Vine. Does Amazon Vine still have a role to play? And my second question completely unrelated is, does advertising play a role yet in the establishment, or does that come later? So Vine and Advertising paid media within phase one, Who wants to take that one?

Onno Huyser
So our comments on Vine, you know, I think it still does have a role. We haven't seen massive success with it, but we do have some clients where it's worked quite well. I, I would definitely advise looking at externally source reviews that are compliant with Amazon Season C’s and they are services which provides reviews in that way, I must be very clear though, that this has to be compliant with Ts and Cs, knowing full well the issues that have been experienced in the last few years around, should I say, inappropriately sourcing reviews.

So we are not a proponent of that. But there are tactics and mechanisms which are appropriate. So I would definitely look at those reviews, feed the algorithm, and we know that, and they certainly do give confidence to the shopper. So having a good strategy in place for reviews is essential. And it's part of kickstarting your growth.

Stephen Lloyd
Yeah, I completely agree with that. Reviews have become very important part of Amazon. So Vine does have to have a role in there still. It's a very quick note. If anyone's purely got a vendor account and they're looking to do Vine, it's worth setting up a seller account just to do Vine unless you can get credits from your vendor manager running Vine through vendors. Incredibly expensive in comparison to the seller. 

And further to that with the advertising point. I think there is a place for advertising in the establishment phase. I mean, especially if you've got a brand that has little to no organic traction on Amazon to begin with, you've kind of got to create that demand. So you will spend probably less in advertising. You'll have far worse ACOSs in those beginning stages, but you have to feed that algorithm initially to be able to establish in the first place. So I think both do play a role. I would say what's probably more important that our establishment phase is actually trying to bring offsite traffic onto Amazon. So if you have an existing sales base off Amazon or social media base off of that Amazon. Being able to leverage some of that towards that space to initially grow it. 

Paul Sonneveld
That is probably the whole topic in itself, but, very, very interesting. So when we are moving into the acceleration phase, phase two, what are the key lever look like? What are the strategies that you're then looking to implement with your brands and your clients? 

Onno Huyser
So when we accelerating, the main objective is to gain market share and to establish profitable lines. I think we feel that in establishment, it's a good outcome would be a break even at the end of that. But during acceleration, we should be looking to generating some profits. It's the first time where we'll be having serious conversations about advertising investments, with a market share focus. You'll focus on creating big variation structures. 

Later on, we talk about breaking up variations, which I think is quite interesting. So that has its, its own, its own life. Continuous SEO focus pretty much on competitors. You really want to drive up your sales rank as much as possible. More on the review side, targeting of competitors and products. Social listening is an interesting aspect, which we've identified. We can talk about that some more, and affiliates and, considering hybrid at this stage would introduce that there. Sometimes we talk about hybrid even at the establishment phase, but generally speaking, you need some traction first. I think before we'd consider introducing hybrid. 

Paul Sonneveld
So, and when you say hybrid, you're talking 1P and 3P as a hybrid or you're, or is this a different terminology?
 
Onno Huyser
Yeah. Yes. 1P and 3P, exactly. 

Paul Sonneveld
So specifically, are you talking about starting as a 1P as an Amazon vendor? And at this point, you're starting to open up a seller account and starting to run a hybrid strategy in certain scenarios? Is it what it looks like?

Onno Huyser
I mean, we feel it's important to focus. And there are complexities with running a hybrid model and it's been discussed before very well on your podcast and your show, Paul. So no need to cover that ground again. But it is definitely something that we increasingly favoring and we've had some very good examples of successes in that space. 

Paul Sonneveld
Absolutely. Yeah. No, I think, I'm a big proponent of hybrids trying to, you know, work out the best of both worlds, right? Why say goodbye to one another? If you can optimize both, for sure. Yeah. Just before we move on to the next phase, you mentioned like we're looking to establish some profit level of profitability, break even and maybe profitability on some products. That probably by default means that actually phase one is sort of going a little bit back here is tend to be loss-making.

In terms of the first phase, probably as far as side questions, this is something that we always struggle with back in the days when we used to run an agency. How do you manage client expectations and how do you get them to sell to kind of the investment upfront? I mean, probably must be a topic, but I'd love to just hear a little bit of insight in terms of how you go about that conversation with your clients.

Onno Huyser
It's a great question, and I feel your pain because we experience it frequently. There's perhaps a few ways. One is by actually having this conversation around business maturity and explaining to people that developing an Amazon business isn't all that different from any business. It requires an investment mindset. And certainly, when you're establishing any kind of retail operation, there's money down, there's money. And I think the better that conversation goes, the easier it is to motivate for an investment. 

The second piece I'll add into that is a growth plan, is ready to have a KPI-driven growth plan, which keeps both sides, clients and the agency in our particular case, focused on the same thing. You know, the risk during establishment is to really become scattered and not to focus on what you're actually attempting to do here. You know, the days of get rich quick on Amazon 10 years ago, it's easy, low competition. Those are so far gone now. But I think people still have the echoes of that and they're expecting to make a profit from day one, and that simply isn't the case.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. So, I'm just bringing, bringing ourselves back up there. So, let's move on to phase three then, the defend and grow. Actually, before we move on to the specifics there, what do you look at to say, okay, we're ready to move into phase three now, you know, what are there KPIs or some sort indicators that allow you to go, okay, we're ready to move to the next phase here. What do you look at?

Stephen Lloyd
So there's probably, there's a lot we would look at as the short answer to that one. Probably the simplest way to put it is in acceleration you'll have clients, and other companies that you are targeting. You'll have things that you are benchmarking yourself against. There'll be a market share portion that you are trying to pull from. And the point you move into stage three is effectively when other people are looking at you in that same way. So when you have a section of the market that someone else is now coming after. 

So your acceleration phases, you are growing and taking from other areas. Your defend and growth stage is very simply when you have that chunk, you don't want to lose it and you want to keep up that acceleration. So it's where you really start looking at making sure that your advertising has things like brand defense in there, you're making sure that other people aren't potentially infringing on your trademarks, copyrights. And things like this is something we see all the time where common like trademarks that can also be used as a phrase within the product and people using those and capitalizing on the fact, they might have a higher sales rank or are willing to spend more on certain cost per clicks. 

And it's just trying to keep that bit that you've worked so hard in the acceleration phase to make sure that you keep that but then still continue to grow from beyond that. So I don't think there's a hard and fast rule of when you hit that and that can be very different for brands, different companies, and these phases can really take a much different time period really depending on the brand and very much like the categories that you're actually looking at. 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. So in phase three, obviously I completely understand the defend piece based on what you've just articulated, people are watching you as opposed to you always watching them and they're bidding against you and all of that. What does the growth component look like in phase three and, and how do you drive that? What are the levers?

Stephen Lloyd
Good question. So, some of them are quite similar to your acceleration phase. So in like your establishment phase, you've built up your review base, you've worked out what works in terms of your campaigns. You've built up a presence on the platform, and you've got something to actually then accelerate forward. And then your acceleration phase, you've continued to grow your advertising, your ACOS will have dropped your organic sales will have picked up that you are actually growing. 

So, in many ways, that side of it wouldn't change in the defend and grow. You would continue with those activities, but it would be effectively, the brand defense and you'd be trying to further optimize. So you'd be trying to improve on your campaigns. You'd be trying to work on your increasing your conversion rates. You'd do things like variation. You'd want to look at your variations, see what you can capitalize on there. You might be adding in new products at this stage. So it is a lot of different things that you can kind of work on there. And there's again, no kind of one size fits all solution to it. 

Paul Sonneveld
You mentioned before, actually, just to pause on one thing, you mentioned spinning off variations. Is that something that occurs in this particular phase? Do you mind just elaborating on that a little bit more? I think people understand theoretically, and practically, what does it mean?

Stephen Lloyd
Yeah, that's fine. So variations are obviously a very powerful thing on Amazon. You can put together quite a lot of products into one page and you've got the advantage of the shared sales rank, the shared reviews, and the fact that if somebody comes there and they wants, let's say it'd a variation of t-shirts, you can have all the sizes, all colours, the patterns, and if somebody turns up, they can pick between any of the different things that they want.

The problem that you get is that you actually do have a disadvantage with variations that comes when you have a very high sales rank, which is that you'll take up, say the number one spot or the number five spot in a subcategory. The problem is that you only take up that spot. So the next size that we've looked at doing with brands before is when you get to a very high point in your subcategory. We actually did this for a client while they were at the number one spot in their subcategory, and you split the variation out. 

So we didn't make it so it was just completely individual listings, but they had about 40 listings in their variation. So we split it out to, I think it was five variations, and they ended up taking up the number one spot, the number five spot, the number six spot and number 10 spot, and it just drove down their competition.

So that is a simultaneous growth and defend because you're pushing down your competitor's kind of real estate in what they're able to see, but you're also increasing the exposure of people seeing the products. And we look at doing that either in the defend and growth stage or in the yield stage. Because it's, you've got to have got the products to a point where that out, that exposure and that kind of really real estate protection is worth more than that's combined sales rank and review piece.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. So there's a tipping point where actually it starts to make sense to try and essentially grab more real estate on the search results. 

Stephen Lloyd
Yeah. 

Paul Sonneveld
And squash other competitors down the fold or somewhere down the page. Yeah. Very interesting. Okay, let's move on and let's talk about the last phase, Yield. How does that differ from phase three and what are the activities that you typically view in this phase? 

Onno Huyser
So, I think some of the activities there are, could be applicable also to defend and grow, but one of them that we've identified is DSP. So, having a much better understanding of the market for your products. It's a good time to look at DSP. So that's definitely something. We also look at, visual SEO, which is an interesting term that we only came across recently, where it looks at, should I say, recreating, or rebuilding listings in such a way to really optimize traffic and conversions based very much on data.

Now, this is different from what we typically do, with listings where we are looking at groups or lines of products. Here, in this particular case, we are looking at individual ones and traffic to those. And these are your top performers. It's an interesting conversation around that. We'd look at pricing strategy and dynamic pricing in particular, and we'd look at a whole range of day-to-day tactics. So day parting, which is something that we deploy anyway in the acceleration phase, but there are other day-to-day tactics that you'd want. Here, it's a bit of a slugfest. You're going toe to toe, top brands. So investment in advertising is obviously ugly, crucial and you can fall off, if you positioned, you know, high in your subcategory, you can drop very quickly if you take your eye off the ball. So this sort of day-to-day philosophy, I think is what we emphasizing here.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that makes sense. There's a lot of sort of very specialized tools that you then bring to the table. One of the things we've. But I, I guess that's implicit in our conversation is, we're talking about a brand on one particular, in one particular Amazon market that we're sort of nurturing and we're working through the phases. At what stage does it make sense to look in another Amazon market from an expansion point of view? Obviously, you know, Europe being kind of an easier option there than say, going from the US to Australia. But at what sense do you talk to your customers about Marketplace expansion to other countries and maybe even off Amazon to Walmart or somewhere else?

Stephen Lloyd
Good question. Again, that it can come up at various points and there are a few different things that can kind of position where that conversation will happen. So the two most common places that would come up are stages three and four. So defend and grow and yield. So when you've got to that kind of yield space. When you're at that space, then obviously there is still some room to grow on Amazon, but you get to a point of almost diminishing returns, there's so much that you can get out the platform. 

Similarly with Defend and Grow, where the most obvious place might be for you to grow in those additional marketplaces or in additional challenges that. So that's the natural point that it can come up. And of course, it's not always the case that someone has started from Amazon. They could have other platforms that they're working on. And we've definitely had companies where they've gone from multiple regions simultaneously. So we've done it right from the establishment phase. Probably the main part of the conversation that comes up, especially when we go from like the Defend and Grow and the yield stage, is that when you go into these new marketplaces on Amazon, you really are starting in that establishment phase again. 

There is stuff that you can carry across. So you can do things like global reviews. You can pull across some of the traction, but you are entering a very different space with different rules and there are going to be differences in languages if you cross different borders and different regional terms even if you go for like USA, where obviously it's still English, but they have different and things that they will use and discuss and it's just a very different ball game in marketplace and you can get very different maturities of subcategories. 

So a lot of the conversations kind of around what makes sense to actually migrate across the fact that it is, again, that establishment phase. And as I was saying earlier, it's very much that upfront conversation of your first period in this new marketplace is probably going to be break even or loss-making. You're going to be looking at ACOSs that are far higher than what you've been used to in these recent months, and it'll be very much an investment into going into this space.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. As we wrap up, I've sort of got one or two more questions left. I've got a lot more left, but I'm looking at the clock and we're well over half an hour. A lot more to digest here, but, it'll be remiss of me not to ask you this question, Steven, which is, we've talked about the framework, and I think we've got a great understanding now, but one of the questions that remains with me is how does the framework differ or perhaps how does the execution or the criteria? How do they differ between Sellers and vendors? Where are the similarities and where are the differences? 

Stephen Lloyd
Good question. Your establishment phase if you are running purely vendor is going to be harder. Vendor is a pessimistic platform and trying to launch products and purely start products from vendor, you are going to find that quite difficult, especially with want to run now being very much brand reg dependent. They're putting a lot more requirements around these things and wanting to see traction on initial units going through. It's a lot harder to just do a pure launch with vendor these days. I'd say if you're looking at doing a vendor launch, you want it to be a hybrid launch really. 

In both cases though, you are, the similarities are kind of a bit easier to talk to. You’ll want to do a low number of products initially, which probably to kind of just go into that marketplace. Yeah, your low, low number of products, initiatives, you want to kind of work out what's happening across the different ones, not be too stretched thin in terms of advertising budget. So that's another big consideration is how much you have to kind of put behind and invest in terms of starting up on that.

I would say it's easier to start on Seller because you can control like that FBA stock going in and if you're going purely at seller on it and you've got that opportunity to put stock into FBA or you've got the opportunity to stick things at FBM. And I would say in general, better to go FBA because you've got the benefits of Prime and there's very different conversion rates between FBA versus FBM. And for that reason, I would say that seller is a slightly faster establishment phase generally. Because with vendor in general, you are subject to their ordering patterns, their algorithms, and everything within that. 

With FBA, you can feed it a lot more. Similarly with purely a vendor model, because they have control over the RPs, there's opportunities for them to shift those around and do their own experiments within it. So I would say that the establishment phase is definitely easier with seller and I would usually look at doing your establishment phase more with seller to begin with, and then bringing in the vendor account more at your acceleration stage or potentially even your defend and grow stage. 

Paul Sonneveld
I see, I see. Okay. Thank you for that. I have one final question and I would, I'd love to get your take on, I'd love to get both of your takes on this actually, but the question really is, we started this podcast with the changes we've seen through Covid and after. If you are in the business of making predictions, what do you see in the future? I mean, what do you see for Amazon and for brands in the next 12 to 18 months? Maybe Onno, you want to go first?

Onno Huyser
Well, we are aware that that brand range is becoming more and more of an issue, and I would expect to see more focus on that since it's becoming more powerful. I also think business pricing is something to keep an eye on. You know, our perspective is that the B2B context within Amazon is probably an area which is undercooked in their eyes compared to D2C space. They probably reached some kind of plateau there. So eking out further returns and growth in that market is going to be harder and harder. So that'll be very interesting to keep an eye on that. And it's something I'm quite excited about. 

Paul Sonneveld
Great. Your thoughts Stephen?

Stephen Lloyd
I agree with what Onno just said. I think brand reg is going to be a very big piece within here. I mean, I mentioned earlier about transparency and their big push on this, and both are really two sides of the same coin. Amazon's really trying to clamp down in the marketplace and there was a big push earlier this year where a large number of vendors actually received emails saying that they are going to be removed from the platform.

And Amazon is actually looking to move vendor to being brand only or brand or exclusive distributors only, which is originally what vendor was meant to be. And it's kind of diverted from that over recent years and Amazon's pushing to bring that back into that space. 
So I think there's going to be a big migration of products from vendor to seller in that way. I don't think vendors going anywhere. I think vendor will still have a place Amazon for many years to come. But there is a definite shift in how they're kind of running that and how much the brand reg piece is playing a part in that. 

I also think there's going to be a big push with off Amazon activity. So as Onno mentioned, the whole business pricing thing. I think a big push for this is that they probably are starting to get to a point of plateau where they're about 50% of e-commerce sales now in the UK and I think in many other countries there's only so much of that can go up. Then they're going to continue to grow it. But while the size of the pie might be biggest there, it's not their only opportunity. 

Things like business pricing, we've seen that by default now, new vendor accounts being set up, have a co-op agreement for business pricing. They're really trying to push for com for companies by default to be selling to that side of the platform. And big pushes for things like off Amazon advertising, especially with their partner platforms like Twitch. And I think we could see a lot more of them compete in other spaces. And I'm expecting to see them do something to kind of try and rival the Shopify kind of elements of things. Try and push something in towards that side of the space. And most probably start being more competitive towards some of their other natural competitors such as eBay. 

Paul Sonneveld
Interesting. Okay. Time will tell. Time will tell. Well, thank you so much for sharing your perspectives. That's been fantastic. Before we wrap up, I always love ask for any Amazon brands or agencies that are looking to get in touch and looking to perhaps learn more about the framework you've designed there. What's the best way for them to get hold of you? And, maybe you Onno know that you are probably best place to answer this one. 

Onno Huyser
Welcome to visit our website, rt7digital.com, and get in contact with us, via the site. Or alternatively, you can contact me directly at onno@rt7digital.com.

Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. Well, Stephen and Onno, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the episode today. Like all of my other guests, you've been super generous. You know, you've developed a proprietary piece of a framework here to drive your brands. Thank you so much for sharing it with the wider audience and sharing some of those, practical tips and strategies and how you execute along the way. I really appreciate it. So thank you so much for being on the show and I look forward to a following up session. 

Onno Huyser
You are welcome. Thank you, Paul. 

Stephen Lloyd
No problem. Thanks.

Paul Sonneveld
Take care. All right everyone. That is it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed learning more about how you can take that strategic approach to really growing and managing the lifecycle of a brand through Amazon, right from the establishment right all the way through to the end. If you do have questions for the team at rt7, make sure to get hold of Onno. And for now, until next week, have a wonderful week and see you then. Thank you.