Overview

This project aims at scalling up high quality seller acquisition channels for Amazon India Marketplace by understanding the core value prop, ideal customer profile and the overall market potential for brand registered businesses.

Understanding the product

The Problem: Starting from scratch in a competitive Indian market can be daunting for new brands. They often struggle with low awareness among their target audience. Potential customers may not be familiar with the brand or its products. Such brands will also face challenges with limited financial resources to invest in a full fleged infrastructure like setting up digital presence, building fulfillment and logistic ensuring reach to the wider audience. More importantly building trust via positive reviews and customer experience.

Core Value Proposition: Amazon enables instant access to crores of customers, servicing 100% pincodes in India. With customers trust on Amazon, owing to its customer service, Amazon has immpeccable credibility associated to its brand along with various tools to promote brand products effectively. Amazon also provides brands with a full stack fulfillment and logistic solution i.e Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) that allows brand to focus on product quality while Amazon handles storage, shipping and customer service. The core value proposition lies in the opportunity for an emerging brand to quickly establish itself in the market with support and infrastucture provided by Amazon.

Product Insights: As of 2023, Amazon houses over 12 lakh+ seller from over 17k pincodes in India. With delivery network across 100% of India's serviceable pincodes, it also provides brands with an opportunity of global expansion allowing them to access markets across 200+ countries. Amazon has till date created 18,000 crorepati sellers of which 5,100 sellers reached this milestone in 2022 itself. Additionally, Amazon provides 7+ custom selling programs to supports businesses across various industries. One of the key program that Amazon has introduced for emerging brands is "Amazon Launchpad". The program focusses on providing enhanced visibility & launch support by enabling access to suite of tools that help brands to optimize brand portfolio.

Brand/Seller registration flow:

Understanding the User

To define ICPs, we interviewed about 8-10 existing brand sellers on Amazon to understand their unique characteristics, needs and motivations. These users were shortlisted basis the following criterias:

• Tenure on the platform: Between 3 to 12 months
• Seller Type: Brand Registered
• City: Metro & Tier 1
• Total GMS: Greater than 3 Lacs
• Launch Type: Self-Serve (Unassisted)

Understanding the market (TAM, SAM & SOM)

As of 31st December 2023, according to GST system statistics, India has about ~15 million GST registered tax paying businesses, of which ~2.6 million businesses are trademark(brand) registered. Given that Amazon aims at acquiring brand sellers, trademark registered sellers qualifies for the criteria, thereby this would be the TAM that it can cater to. To drill down further, trademarks are classified into 45 categories, of which ~13 categories are relevant to goods that can be sold on Amazon. These ~13 categories contribute to ~42% of total trademarked businesses resulting to a SAM of 1.09 million trademark registered businesses. Furthermore, about ~63% of trademarked businesses originated from Metro and tier 1 cities in India, resulting in an approximate SOM of ~690k trademarked businesses. We are currently targetting brands only from Metro and tier 1 cities, given the awareness and education about selling online would be higher.

Channel Selection and Experiment

Having operated in the country for over a decade with reach to crores of customers and over 12 lac sellers on the platofrm already, Amazon's marketplace product is at mature stage. Upon delving deep into the various acquisition sources, we have identified that:

• SEM & SEO cumulatively contribute to ~70% brand seller launches, compared to only 8% from referral program
• On the contrary, brands acquired through referral program have 1.5X avg GMS/seller compared to SEM & SEO

Since SEM & SEO are already at scaled and optimal stage (ranked 1st on most search keywords), it would be ideal to build scale on referral program given that it is contributing to higher quality sellers. Further more we will also look at experimenting with product integration and partner marketing based on the prominent products used by sellers across various ICPs we identified.

Referral Program

The current referral program is structured around cash rewards for sellers where they receive a reward for INR 2k when the referee successfully launches their seliing account. Furthermore, the referrer may also qualify for additional rewards worth up to INR 8k based on the number of orders (net of cancellations and returns) fulfilled by the Referee for a period of 45 days from the launch date.

The current program only suffices "money" on the motivation quadrant (i.e Money, Access, Dopamine & Fame) and which overall lacks in providing platform currency as reward. The referring mechanism is also structured only for 1:many communication without any personalisation in place.

To address this problem, we suggest pivoting the incentives from cash rewards to sponsored ads credits with equivalent amount to that of existing cash rewards.

Sponsored Ads on Amazon are a form of advertising that allows sellers to promote their products on the marketplace. These ads appear in various locations on Amazon, including search results and product detail pages. Sellers bid on keywords relevant to their products, and when shoppers search for those keywords, the sponsored products appear prominently.

Ad credits as a reward will address all 4 quadrants of the motivation scale, i.e Money: since running ads on PPC is cost to the seller, Access: allowing access to the ads feature for sellers who don't have the budget for it initially, Dopamine: As ads will result in higher discoverability of their product listings and Fame: As their brands awareness increases.

Targetting users for referrals: Users will be asked for referral at the end of each happy moments in the workflow below

How will the user discover/share/track referral program: We will primarily drive awareness of the program via in-platform notifications. These notifications will be triggered only upon achievement of milestone suggested in the workflow above. Notification could be in form of pop-ups in the specific feature or via email / WA or in the notification panel, however the messgaging of the notification will be structured to corelate with the milestone that was achieved by the seller. Further, the referral dashboard will allow sellers to choose how they'd like to share the refferal link, i.e design the messaging to suit the preferred channel selected by the sellers. (1:1 vs 1:many communication). This dashboard will also enable the seller to track his total referrals and earnings per refferal as well. Lastly, the invite being sent by the seller will also communicate milestones achieved to the referee thereby enhacing the "fame" aspect of our motivation quadrant. The program will be further structured with additional incentives like time-bound account management (TBAM) support to ensure they continue to refer. Sample structure below

Product Integration and Partner Marketing

During our user interviews to define ICPs, we noticed that product like Wix, Shiprocket & Zoho were common amongst brands operating online and offline. This is mainly due to the nature of the product being complementary for brands to manage their day to day business operations. Circling back to our ICPs being ideal profile of high quality sellers, we believe by building integration and partnership with such products can enable to Amazon to reach potential high value sellers at low costs.

The overall pitch of the product integration will be around how Amazon will enable its partners to add value to their customers by creating an additional high potential sales channel and how this collaboration will add brand value and trust by associating with a global brand like Amazon.

The aim of the product integration will be enable seamless linking of partner's users account to Amazon and be able to duplicate their product listings on Amazon. For eg: In case of Wix, the product integration will enable their ecom users to replicate their product listing on Amazon, and be able to manage fulfillment and inventory sync from wix dashboard directly. In case of Shiprocket, the product integration will allow its users to sell on Amazon and leverage shiprockets logistics to fulfill order via self-ship. The discovery and awareness of such partnership will be generated via co-branded marketing campaigns and Press Releases.

Possible flow of the product integration: