The winds have changed. How Amazon is evolving their relationship with Sellers to build the “greatest partnership story in the history of the retail industry”

This living document explores how Amazon has evolved their relationship with their Selling Partners over the last two years and how they are setting the new standard for how large corporations should interact with the partners who rely on their technology/services.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to participate in Amazon’s Executive Seller Summit, held during Amazon’s Accelerate Conference in Seattle. This limited invite came after sharing feedback, surfacing issues, suggesting solutions, and generally communicating with Dharmesh Mehta, the Vice President at Amazon leading all Selling Partners, for almost 1.5 years. After attending this event, I can say, without a doubt, there has never been a better time to sell on Amazon.

But before that, a little background on myself for the reader. I worked at Amazon for 6 years from 2014 to 2020. I started as a L4 “Brand Specialist” (Aka Vendor Manager) in Retail, specifically Office Products, and ended as an L6 Sr. Product Manager on Prime Video’s International team. My time at Amazon was life changing. I don’t think there is a better environment for someone to learn and grow than Amazon, especially just out of college. Name a job, any job, and chances are it’s available at Amazon. But the beauty of career development there is that you’re allowed to learn and work towards a new job, even your dream job. Amazon gave me the opportunity to become a better version of myself and I truly appreciate that.

While at Amazon, my wife, Junghwa, decided to become an entrepreneur and started our business — one that primarily sells on Amazon. About two years later, I left my literal dream job at Amazon, for a totally unexpected dream opportunity working together with (for) my wife. Now after almost five years since starting that business, we just passed the 8-figure mark.

Now back to 2 years ago as I left Amazon and ventured out as a small business owner. At that time, and the years preceding, any seller would tell you that their worst nightmare, the source of their greatest stress in life, was Amazon. So many built businesses and livelihoods on the back of Amazon’s Marketplace, but they lived with the notion that at any moment, “The Amazon giveth and the Amazon taketh away.” Sellers often found themselves crushed within the margin of error of a new algorithm, a seller support agent, or even just Amazon’s Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). And if you found yourself in the margin of error, good luck getting out.

A quick aside, at that time you could even buy “suspension” insurance for your Amazon business. Although you can’t anymore as the insurance companies quickly realized the frequency of issues with Amazon and were bleeding money…

Being an “Amazonian” or now, “Ex-Amazonian,” I felt that I at least had some solid “Hail Mary’s” within Amazon should something go wrong with my business. Funny enough though, Amazon is such a large organization that unless you know someone literally familiar with the issue, they can’t help you much, if not at all. I ran into a couple of those issues after leaving. Once had to watch our best-seller go down for a full 7-days, for a false-positive issue. That was heart wrenchingly stressful.

One day, after a conversation with Molson Hart, he told me to get on Twitter. And I did. At first, I used it as a tool to just “sh*tpost” on how bad my experience was as a Seller and how even more frustrating it was being Ex-Amazon. After a period of venting, I decided to pivot and put back on my Product Manager hat and offer solutions instead of complaints. One day an opportunity arose. I had tweeted about the below issue and tagged Dave Clark (then CEO of WW Consumer),

Believe it or not, but that Tweet, and Dave’s simple acknowledgment of the issue and his willingness to hear a solution, changed my life, and I do believe the lives of thousands of sellers around the world. But even more importantly, it unearthed a new paradigm, yes this is how big of a change has occurred, on how large corporations should interact with those that have built businesses or livelihoods on their platforms.

See what the Amazon Seller community has experienced with Amazon is no different than what Uber drivers experience with Uber, businesses/agencies that rely on Facebook experience with Facebook, or hosts with AirBnB, etc. All of these huge companies were built on the backs of their partners, but along the way they seem to have lost touch with the little guys and in doing so created a love/hate relationship with one another.

Here are a couple recent examples from Facebook and AirBnB:

Now Corporations are not 100% responsible for the love/hate relationship between them and their small partners. To compound the issue of weak signal, the partners of these corporations tend to quickly become tribal in the form of private communities (Facebook groups, forums, etc.), often with a “guru” type figurehead. This is especially true for Amazon Sellers. When faced with a challenge, these groups quickly come together to find a workaround BUT not a way to fix the root cause of the challenge. And because all of this happens in private, the signal again becomes lost to those that can affect change.

The Fix

Here’s how I think Amazon and its Selling Partners are in the process of fixing it and if things hold and continue, will be the example for all other platforms on how to build successful partnerships.

1. Senior Leadership is publicly available

The public availability of Senior Leadership is the single most important factor in building a successful partnership. Like at any large company, “sh*t does not flow upstream”. You can have the most empathetic, helpful, intelligent, and passionate leader, but if you present her/him with bad data, they will focus their efforts/priorities on the wrong things. In the case of Amazon Sellers, we are the signal, and instead of providing direct and immediate feedback to leadership, we were playing a game of telephone through the ranks of the lowest employees at Amazon to the highest.

A quick aside, I believe developing features for platforms which support livelihoods is very different than developing features for platforms which entertain their users. As an overly simplistic example, if Netflix released a new feature for its mobile app and 20% of its core users didn’t like it, Netflix may say that 80% “likeability” is good enough. However, if Amazon released a new feature for its Sellers, but it caused 20% of them to lose their livelihood, it could not be considered a success.

Let’s breakdown the launch of a bad feature with the status quo format for supporting partners and then compare it with the availability of senior leadership.

Using Amazon as an example of the status quo format of most of these corporations, here’s how a signal (again an overly simplistic example) would eventually make it back up the chain of command for the release of a bad feature: (1) Within minutes of the new feature launching (let’s say on a Wednesday afternoon), impacted Sellers would notice that their livelihood was in some way destroyed, (2) Within an hour of the feature launch, Sellers would begin contacting Amazon Seller Support, (3) Since Amazon has a large Seller Support team, each call would likely be directed to a new agent, (4) After about 24 hours, Seller Support agents may have had enough repeat calls about the issue to identify a trend and try and escalate, (5) 48 hours after the issue, on a Friday, the escalation reaches a key stakeholder at Amazon, let’s say a L6 Sr. Product Manager, but the Sr. PM doesn’t think it is that widespread and figures he/she will look into it on Monday, (6) The Sr. PM leaves for the weekend, (7) On Monday 96 hours after the issue, the Sr. PM meets his tech team for a weekly standup and brings up the issue and its now more apparent urgency, (8) The on-call developer on the team works on a fix for the day, (9) The next day, on Tuesday, the fix is code reviewed and pushed to production, (10) No notice of the bug fix is sent to those affected. In this typical timeline, it took almost a week from the signal to the solution. All the while, Amazon lost the trust of many Sellers who went almost a week with no income.

Here’s how that exact same scenario would playout in with publicly available leadership: (1) Within hours of the issue, Sellers post on Twitter and email leadership about the issue, (2) Leadership quickly realizes this is a trend and large scale issue so they immediately send an email to the VP or Director who owns the new feature, (3) Nobody goes home until the feature is fixed, (4) The feature is fixed within 24 hours.

Signal is very important and the timing of that signal is even more critical.

Just as it is critical for Senior Leadership to receive the right signal at the right time, it is also just as critical for the partners to receive acknowledgement of the signal from Senior Leadership. Having acknowledgement from a leader that they understand your problem and will work to fix it is worth 1000x more than the same acknowledgement from a support agent. Their words matter. This is how you “Earn Trust” with your partners.

Amazon did all of these things. Dharmesh Mehta was their Senior leader chosen as the tribute (Hunger Games reference). He was publicly available on Twitter or via email (even following the parody accounts which sarcastically mocked the teams he owned). He acknowledged issues. He regularly conversed with Sellers who wanted to provide constructive criticism and offer solutions. He realized there was an escalation gap for Sellers and developed the @amznsellerhelp Twitter handle. He launched features that were asked for. He publicly took action against bad acting Sellers (e.g. Blackhats). And more…

All of this gave Sellers a brand-new sense of security — if all else fails, we have a path. Whereas just shy of two years ago, if all else would have failed, so would have you.

2. Dirty laundry is aired out publicly

Believe it or not, but Amazon getting “called out” in public is perhaps the best opportunity for them to show not only Sellers that they care, but reporters, legislators, regulators, and the general public. The response and solution to the issue at hand is public hard data to show that they care about their partners. The PR here is worth its weight in gold.

It’s the absence of a response from Amazon or other large corps that will turn the heads of reporters, legislators, regulators, and the general public. For example, if your Amazon account is unjustly shut down, and you’ve received no response from any sort of leader, you instead start tagging your local Congressman/Senator, reporter, regulator, etc. to help with the issue. And with that, things will then not play out well for Amazon. I am proof of this. Initially while “sh*tposting” about Amazon on Twitter, without a reply from anyone from Amazon, it was first the reporters that followed me and wanted to learn more about my experience, then guess who followed me — Lina Khan the then nominated Chairwomen of the FTC and one of Amazon’s biggest antagonists (note, she later unfollowed me when I started sharing positive experiences with Amazon among other posts 😉).

This is a good lesson for any Leader to be sure to tend to their flock…

With any partnership, it’s a two-way street. Just as you have the right to call Amazon out for issues, Amazon has the right to return the favor. If a Seller unjustly portrays Amazon as a bad guy for taking down their account when in fact the Seller was breaking Terms of Service, then Amazon has every right to blast them publicly. And they have been…

Additionally, its important for the Selling Partner to share the results of the issue. If Amazon fixed it, let the world know.

3. There is a clear escalation path.

While Dharmesh is the final level escalation path, for any good partnership to work, there needs to be levels of escalation built into the partnership (e.g. Dharmesh cannot personally solve everything). Dharmesh once told me over coffee that he and his team do track the number of times an issue reaches him for escalation divided by the total number of issues received by his teams. And that number is quite small. The sign of a good escalation path is exactly that.

In the case of Amazon, to escalate an issue, a Seller typically follows this path: 1) Files a case with Seller Support, 2) If the case is not resolved, a Seller can press the new “Escalate Case” button (Dharmesh and his teams listened to the feedback of Selling Partners and just released this new feature), 3) If not resolved, post on Twitter tagging @amznsellerhelp, and 4) If not resolved, tag @DharmeshMehta and or email him directly at dharmeshm@amazon.com.

Believe it or not, but just 2 years ago there was no #2, #3, or #4 above. Amazon has significantly improved this escalation path.

4. Feedback is encouraged, collaborated, acknowledged, and the results are reported.

When Dave Clark responded to my tweet with:

the entire Seller community rejoiced. I’m not even joking. We celebrated.

We as Sellers finally had the opportunity to improve the platform that we both loved and hated. Once again, we were able to be heard. I took that opportunity seriously and it resulted in an annual feature request document (which you can find here for 2021 and 2022) sent to him and Dharmesh. Quick aside, having worked at Amazon, I can only imagine the joy for those at Amazon who received an email from Dave Clark (a CEO at Amazon) with my document… Sorry Claire (Director of Selling Partner Empowerment, Communities & Trust for Amazon,) and team!

While sitting down for dinner with Claire, at the Executive Seller Summit, she asked me if we could work together on the next one. Of course, I said “yes!”

5. Select partners build trusted relationships with Senior Leadership

Did the fact that I worked at Amazon for six years help me develop trust with Dharmesh and his team? I’m sure it did. Am I the only Seller Dharmesh talks to? Nope.

Within any group of partners, be it AirBnB Hosts, Facebook Ad Buyers, Uber Drivers or Amazon Sellers, there will always be select individuals who are willing to go above and beyond to provide constructive feedback on the tools/systems that affect their livelihood. These individuals can provide 95% of the signal (if not more) that is needed to improve their partnership with these large corporations. These relationships are the most critical to develop and grow overtime.

Amazon’s Executive Seller Summit was a great example of Amazon investing into its select partners. They invited a curated list of 150 Sellers to spend two days with their executives. It wasn’t just a handshake meet and greet. It was open mics, open Q&A (and Amazon got ripped into a couple of times), cocktails, and lunch/dinners — all with Senior Leadership. As a Seller, I felt heard and looking around the room I could see that every type of Seller was represented and heard.

Amazon did it. Well done, for now.

Conclusion

We aren’t done developing this partnership with Amazon, but we are on the path of developing the “greatest partnership story in the history of the retail industry” and I look forward to continuing to be a part of it. I do hope that this example helps the other large corporations develop their partnership models and symbiotically improve the lives of the little guys and the bottom line of the big guys.