Contacting Brands and Manufacturers

Approaching a brand is harder than approaching a wholesaler, takes longer, and is worth more when it works. The mechanics are the same as the previous lesson. One question is answered completely differently, and that difference is the subject of this lesson.

What is the same

The preparation, the contact methods and most of the questions are unchanged. Website, e-commerce store, resale certificate or VAT number in the signature, company registration number, links to your sites. Phone, form or email.

Where you sell, whether you have a retail store, what your Amazon storefront looks like: answer these exactly as in the previous lesson.

What is different: the website has to offer services

For a wholesaler, a website establishes that you are a real business. For a brand, that is not enough.

A wholesaler makes money by selling stock and does not much mind who to. A brand owner cares about the brand, and to them another Amazon seller is a risk: more sellers competing on price means the price falls, which devalues the brand and reduces what their other channels will pay.

So the brand's default answer is no. Your website has to say what you will do for the brand, not what you want to buy from it. That is why the preparation lesson pointed at large Amazon sellers such as Netrush and Avalanche Industries, neither of which presents itself as a reseller.

The objection you will get

Very often, a version of: we are not taking on any more Amazon sellers.

That is not the end of the conversation. It is a statement of a concern, and the concern is legitimate: too many sellers does damage a brand on Amazon. Agreeing with it is the right first move, because it shows you understand their business rather than just wanting stock.

Then make the case that you are the solution to that concern rather than an instance of it. The arguments given:

• You advertise their products at your own cost. Reinvesting a share of profits into pay-per-click campaigns drives traffic to their listings, which benefits the brand whether or not you make that particular sale.
• You manage and optimise the listings. Most brand listings on Amazon are poor, and improving them raises sales across every seller of that product.
• You help control price. You can monitor for sellers undercutting the recommended price and tell them when it happens.

The last one is the strongest, because it turns the objection around. Their fear is that more sellers means falling prices. You are offering to watch for exactly that.

Services you can realistically offer

• Listing optimisation. The easiest to demonstrate. Look at their listings, find the specific weaknesses, and say what you would change. A concrete observation in a first email is worth more than any general claim.
• Pay-per-click campaigns. With one honest caveat you should raise yourself: advertising a listing only makes sense when there are very few sellers on it. With a dozen sellers, your advertising spend drives traffic that somebody else undercuts you to convert. Saying this makes the offer credible, and it is also an argument for the brand limiting its sellers to you and one or two others.
• Minimum advertised price monitoring. Brands care about this and mostly cannot track it. You can, using Keepa's price tracking and alerts. Most brand owners do not know that tool exists, and knowing it is a genuine piece of expertise you can offer.
• Seller monitoring. Under an exclusive or near-exclusive arrangement, watching for unauthorised sellers appearing on the listing and reporting them.
• Anything outside Amazon you can actually do: SEO, social media, video, an audience of your own.

Only offer what you can deliver. A brand that accepts will expect the work.

Expect it to take longer

Opening a brand account is a slower process than a wholesale account, with more back and forth and more people involved. That is the trade: a direct brand relationship gives better pricing, better supply and often protection from competition on the listing, which is worth considerably more than a wholesaler account.

It is a numbers exercise, and here is the number

The recommendation given is at least 50 emails a week to brands and wholesalers combined.

That figure is the practical heart of this whole module. Most will not reply. Some will decline. The outcome is determined by volume, not by perfecting one approach, and 50 a week is only sustainable if the preparation work is already done: the website exists, the services are written down, the signature is set up, the answers are in a spreadsheet, and the supplier list is built in advance.

That is why the module is ordered the way it is. Everything before this lesson exists so that this lesson can be done at volume.

One thing worth noticing

If you end up delivering services to brands and doing it well, you will have testimonials from brand owners for work that has nothing to do with reselling. That is a business in its own right, and several of the large sellers named earlier arrived at it from exactly this direction.