Make Your Product Go to #1 on Amazon

By blending your personal and professional lives

Sleep. We all crave it. For some of us it comes easier than others. My husband is one of the millions of people who has difficulty falling — and staying — asleep. So when the owners of Apex Beverage, LLC came calling in 2010 with an offer for me to be a founding partner with a focus on marketing their primary product, Serenity Relaxation Beverage, I was IN.

At that time, my children were ages five and two. My acceptance of the position — which included a substantial equity stake — was predicated on my being able to work from home. The other partners and I agreed I would be in the office one day a week and work remotely the rest of the time. We inked the deal and I started burning up the internet. With the occasional family visit to flavor laboratories and bottling plants.

At that time, everyone in the marketing world was fixated on Groupon. Stories abounded about how it opened up new markets and made sales skyrocket. For months, the Apex team and I negotiated with Groupon, trying to get our product included in their listings. We ultimately failed because we did not have a bricks and mortar location, one of the requirements at the time. But in the meantime, I was far from idle. In addition to launching and managing social media accounts under the @drinkserenity handle, I also created a listing on Amazon.com. And that? Turned out to be an incredible coup. Following a series of giveaways, with nationwide excitement stoked by a series of bloggers, the product skyrocketed to #1 on the Amazon bestseller list.

So was it really that simple to reach the #1 slot? Create an Amazon listing and start hosting giveaways? NO. We hit many, MANY snags along the road to #1. First and foremost? The merchant system is VERY different from the interface you see as a private consumer. Even after numerous calls to Amazon support, I was never able to figure out how to download customer information for the thousands of people who purchased Serenity through their website. We wound up hiring an intern to copy and paste that data into spreadsheets. Also? We kept having issues that put our merchant account at risk. A classic one? Shipping the wrong amount of product to the Amazon warehouse handling fulfillment. After two such incidents, we were at risk of having our corporate account suspended, even though I checked and double-checked the shipment to make sure we had sent the correct quantities.

So what smoothed out all the difficulties? Good communication? Documentation? No and NO. I wound up sending one email to customer service. And in that email? I connected the dots between my personal and business accounts. You see, I have been an Amazon.com customer since its earliest days. I was a college student in the early 1990s ordering from both Buy.com and Amazon.

About six months before I began working with Apex, I randomly wound up speaking to Amazon customer service when I had to return an item. The representative could NOT have been nicer — I believe a direct quote was, “You have been a customer for a VERY long time. You spend a lot of money, and you NEVER return anything.” Basically, he was telling me I was on a special VIP list.

I tried to work through ordinary channels with Amazon to resolve issues with our merchant account, I really did. But eventually, when my honesty was being called into question, I sent an email saying, guess what? You may also know me as Katherine Lee of leekathe@yahoo.com! And like magic, all the problems disappeared, never to resurface.