Podcast transcript
Introduction
Hello and welcome to another live edition of Marketplace Masters brought to you by MerchantSpring, your trusted partner for marketplace analytics and vendor reporting. In this series, we delve into the intricacies of e-commerce with a special focus on the challenges that vendors face in elevating their brand and product performance on Amazon.
Paul Sonneveld
I am your host, Paul Sonneveld, and today we're exploring how to transition your business, shifting from Amazon's 1P first-party model to 3P third-party selling. Now, to guide us through today's topic, I'm excited to introduce Zack Rubin, the founder of Red-Tail Consulting. Let me bring them up here.
Zack has a wealth of experience in helping emerging brands navigate the complexities of Amazon with a really keen focus on driving sustainable and profitable growth. His hands-on experience managing businesses on Amazon gives him really unique insights into cross-functional collaboration, opportunity, cost evaluation, and speaking the language that resonates with your organization.
Now, Zack's career in the CPG industry spends nearly 15 years, where he's been a passionate advocate for a whole diverse range of products. This is where it gets interesting. From everyday essentials like toilet paper, to cutting edge AI powered indoor hydroponic gardens. His journey started actually in Macy's buying office with fine China dinnerware. And to this day, he can't help but flip over a dinner plate to check its manufacturer.
Since 2019, He's called Seattle Home, where he lives with his wife and their two cats, James Van Der Beek and Marky Mark. And he's, while he's not immersed in the world of e-commerce, you can find him cycling across the country, chasing the thrill of long distance races. And I believe he's expanded that recently to other continents as well. So Zack, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome.
Zack Rubin
Thank you so much for having me.
Paul Sonneveld
I must ask, you know, I'm originally Dutch as many of our listeners know. But one of your cats names, it sounds like a very Dutch name, like James Van Der Beek, you know, is that, what's the story behind that? I can't help, but, I'm curious now we may not talk about Amazon transition at all. I just want to talk about your cats.
Zack Rubin
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I don't know when my wife and I got him about 10, 11 or 12 years ago, we were just looking for a very unique name and rummaging our brains. And we, we thought about Dawson's Creek and the actor James Vanderbeek, and we liked his movies. And then we got another cat and we just had to keep with the movie star name. So Marky Mark Wahlberg was the next one. And that's Marky Mark over there and his portrait.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Oh, there he goes. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Very good. Awesome. Well, thank you for that context and background. That's very,
Zack Rubin
Of course.
Paul Sonneveld
So let's dive into our topic today. I'm looking forward to this because there's a lot of views when it comes to transitioning 1P versus 3P, why you should do it, is it even a good idea and all that. I guess I'm acknowledging there's different views, but let's just stick to the facts here.
Let's just go through, what do you see, I mean, you've been in this game for a while, what are the most significant differences between being an Amazon vendor versus an Amazon seller? As people are talking about this and considering a transition, what are the things you would highlight to them in terms of those differences?
Zack Rubin
Yeah, I think the main one to start is that the relationship on 1P, if you're fortunate enough to have a vendor manager, is a little bit more similar to a traditional wholesale model where you are trying to build up a relationship and trying to work together towards common goals.
Whereas on seller, it's not a retailer for you. It is a platform for which you can sell your products. And so taking that into account, the main, you know, I think there's three main buckets and I'm sure there's a lot more, but in my mind, it is the transition from almost a semi-automated flow of purchase orders from your vendor manager or from Amazon over to you every Monday and maybe a replenishment order during the week to you having to manually control the inventory that you push into an FBA fulfillment center. So that is, it's a different concept, it requires you a lot more eyeballs on your sales trends.
Then another one is you're moving from an accrual-based, like back-end system of deductions for marketing co-op, freight damage, all these different allowances to one that is really based off of your dimensional weights. And so the same product that worked on your vendor account because you had great accrual rates may not work really well on your seller at the same price point because the fulfillment fees, the inbound fees are just so much higher because, you know, a product could be heavy, bulky.
And then I think what everyone really likes about seller is that you own your data, meaning you have really good visibility into your page views, your sessions, your conversions, all of these different things. And you can see sales while you can't see, you know, real-time sales for the same product at any point in the day, you can see how your sales are going every day, and you can see yesterday's sales as soon as, you know, six in the morning, whereas vendor for POS sales tends to be two to three days behind.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, we certainly see that there, sometimes up to certainly 72 hours, even on the retail analytics side. Makes sense. So as you are, I mean, clearly the way you're talking about these days, it's clearly not for everyone, right? There's drawbacks, there's benefits. For those, what are the types, as you work with different brands, I mean, what are the types of brands where this makes most sense and what are the specific benefits for them? You know, what's the rationale in terms of transitioning?
Zack Rubin
Types of brands really it can, I don't think it's CPG specific in terms of a category. I mean, there's something we said about lower ASP items and heavy bulky items are better for vendor whereas kind of that messy middle of products that are medium sized products are better on seller. And again, that just goes back to the dimensional weight and the accruals.
But I think that if you have a brand that requires a lot of touch with your customer, meaning that, you know, you're launching a new product, and it might have technical issues, and you want to want to always be able to communicate to that customer, that's a great way to a great checkbox that seller might be good for you.
If you have a product that's low return rate, heavy, bulky, smaller, even things like a fast-moving consumable goods, like a toilet paper, it might you might find that getting and cleaning goods, you might find that vendor is actually more beneficial for you. So it's not a one size fits all. And especially with the different changes with fees for inbound fees for selle. It might make sense more now than ever to maintain a vendor relationship depending on your profitability.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, certainly there's, I think most vendors would be shocked once they see if their expense statement from Amazon and all the different fees that Amazon is introducing. In fact, funny story, we have a select channel set up for all the new feed types we detect for Amazon every day. And I'll tell you what, it's pretty busy. There's a lot of things going on in there, so.
Zack Rubin
Just made my heart rate jump.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, it's, well, you know, ultimately costs are going up, right? So that makes sense.
Zack Rubin
Yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
So, I mean, you make some really great points around, obviously, there's the economics to consider, right? You might be able to be profitable in the vendor side, but putting that through Amazon's FBA program and the costs associated with that may make a product unprofitable and it's due to product characteristics. But then you also talked about having this relationship with a customer and being closer to the customer, knowing much more about them and the like. For some reason, I don't know why, but beauty products came to mind, right? I'm talking about products with higher frequency purchase, pretty high price points. What are your thoughts on beauty as a category in terms of vendor versus seller? Because I think that's probably the category that we see on both sides.
Zack Rubin
Did you know that I worked in beauty? Did you know that I worked in beauty at Macy's?
Paul Sonneveld
Oh, no, I didn't know. No, I thought you, I thought you were, you know, a dinnerware, right?
Zack Rubin
I was, but then I went to, I went to Prestige Beauty.
Paul Sonneveld
Um, so I thought, no, I didn't know that. So I'm glad I asked the question, you know, and thanks for raising expectations on how you're going to answer it.
Zack Rubin
Yeah, no, really. Um, yeah. Uh, I think, you know, If we look back a couple years ago before Amazon came out with premium beauty for both vendor and seller, I would definitely say that neither of them were an ideal choice just because you never had a control of the distribution.
But now that you do have Amazon is gating and allowing, you know, for 1p you buy directly from the vendor and for 3p you are the only one that wins the buy box. I still think that seller is a great way to communicate with your customers, especially if you have a product that maybe has a higher price point and with those higher price points comes higher expectations of what the product is going to deliver.
And so having that connectivity can really in a good customer service team, when you get a customer who complains about spending $200 and not being fully satisfied, you can really go back to like traditional like retail and wow them with a customer service experience and maybe get them to either a not leave a one-star review or possibly leave a five star review if you're able to remedy the situation and be provide something that's above and beyond what they expected. So I do think that seller because of that connectivity,
And then from a replenishment standpoint, being able to, you know, if they're not on subscribe and save within all the different tools, like brand tailored promotions, you're really able to go after some cohorts with some specific promotionality, and really not disrupt the buy box, which is extremely important in premium beauty, which is a really map-controlled environment. Yeah, so yeah. Seller that seller wins on that one for me.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, yeah. No, it's sort of, you know, obviously the vendor platform has undergone quite a few changes and it's slowly catching up, but it's certainly still quite behind, obviously both subscribe and save. I get, actually, I haven't looked at vendor lately, but certainly from a raw order data, right? Certainly we do a lot more around lifetime value and what's it called? looking at the customer acquisition cost versus the lifetime value of the customer and in certain categories like that's super critical.
Zack Rubin
I mean, yeah, I mean, and to that point, just from my familiarity with the business, I remember working at Macy's and you would have a customer who was a, let's call it a Shiseido loyalist. And that's a pretty premium high-end cosmetic brand and if you sold them the BB cream, they would also buy other things within that line and I think that's something that seller gives you the opportunity to like market that customer and get them to buy the beauty, you know, the BB cream and then buy something else.
Whereas you don't really have that ability on vendor without having either a vendor manager who's willing to set up those promotions for you. Or I think it's called a SaaS these days, that has to do it on your behalf. So that's another way to kind of increase that reach for lifetime value.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, makes sense. So you've mentioned a lot of the positives, the reasons, the conditions for which it makes sense, or there's a strong rationale. But what about some of the drawbacks? I mean, where do 1P brands get stuck, or I'd say get unstuck as they seek to transition?
Zack Rubin
Yeah, I think, you know, I always like to make a checklist for any of the brands that I'm supporting and go through a really due diligence of all these different things. And you need to have enough green boxes that say you're in favor of seller before making that change. And the one of the first things that I start with is doing a SKU level P&L because of the importance of dimensional weights. That's one thing where all the benefits may be fantastic, the BXGYs, the brand tailored promotions, you know, the list goes on.
But if you fundamentally can't maintain the same love, like the same ASP that your run rate was built on, and your forecast was built on, because of the dimensional weights and the fees, then that that's step one, that can be an obstacle that can really be without a lot of product development and changing your assortment, very difficult to overcome in the short term.
The other one that I find a lot that happens is ASIN or brand gating. And gating might not be the best word for it. But I've had different instances where we set up a seller account when a product has historically been on vendor, and you are prevented from selling that product. That can be a little bit messy. And that's another thing that Amazon goes. I've seen Amazon go through waves of how much they're enforcing it.
So always making sure that you're kind of going through this process well in advance of making a decision. Cause you may find that because of all these different things, you know, you may agree that seller is great, but as you go through the process, you may determine that it's relatively infeasible in the short term and you want to maintain that vendor relationship and your sales going that way.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that makes sense on the sort of really interesting point around Amazon essentially not allowing you to sell certain ASINs via 3P. I certainly see lots of, and it feels a little bit, it's got to do with the maturity model of Amazon in different markets a lot of the time in terms of, you know, do they want to reduce their catalogue on the vendor side or increase it? But, you know, clearly they've got sort of hero products that they don't really want to give up.
How, I mean, maybe sort of a very tangible question, but how transparent are you there in your conversations with, say, the Amazon vendor manager, assuming you have one? Is this something you're doing behind the scenes? You're setting up another seller account and you're just testing ASINs to see if you can put an offer up? Or are you having a very upfront conversation with the vendor manager and saying, this is our plan? What advice do you have in that area?
Zack Rubin
A little bit of both. When I was a vendor manager there, I had no problem talking to vendors about, you know,this tech, this didn't help me as a vendor manager, but I would have, if like the business made more sense for the brand to be on seller for a number of reasons. Like I was okay having that conversation and talking them through like what the risks and the rewards were and kind of helping them through that, knowing that if I lost their business, like, you know, that was going to show up on my WBRs.
Now being on the flip side of that. if I have a vendor manager that we have a relationship with, I definitely think it's a value to have a very open conversation. Because you might find that like some of the products or most of your products that you're trying to sell on vendor are also unprofitable for them. And so it may be a mutually beneficial breakup to move that way.
And as long as you're really, if you do have a vendor manager that like, you know, everyone agrees with that, it can be good to have like a wind down plan where you are, you know, potentially going to a hybrid model to start keeping the certain ASINs separate. And because I think that's the main thing is don't sell the same product on both accounts, because that gets, that's where things get a little bit more contentious, because someone's going to be holding inventory, or someone may feel like their price is being influenced. But yeah, I think it's good to have an open conversation, even if it's a difficult one.
Paul Sonneveld
I just want to ask one follow-up question, Zack, because I'd love to just, you have been a vendor manager. I didn't even include that in my intro, but I just want to sort of get into the mind of the vendor manager. Because sometimes we're like, Oh, you know, Amazon, they're so mean. They're not allowing me to sell through 3p. I mean, yes, that might be the outcome, but just help us understand. How the vendor manager looks at it and how are they incentivized and why is that resistance there? So what's, I mean, not a super amount of detail, but what's the agenda of the vendor manager and just help us understand that a little bit better. So we can have on this understanding of this broader issue.
Zack Rubin
I mean, on a very metric-based situation, if vendor X no longer is fulfilling their purchase orders on a weekly basis and my ruse and different in-stock metrics are they're going to worsen, I'm going to have to bridge to that. And then from down the line, as Amazon sells through their inventory, and I no longer have that, like top line revenue, then it becomes not only a bridging effort as the vendor from the vendor manager, but also I've got to find either a replacement, and it might not have to be the exact one for one in terms of product that I've lost that I need to regain.
But I need to find something. So that kind of like kicks off a little bit more of business development. Or I need to come up with strategies to get more volume out of my existing vendor manager. So that's where it kind of goes back to more of a traditional, you know, retail model where like, yeah, I just lost sales, like now I have to offset them somehow. And then it also depending on the brand, and what their like lifetime value is on Amazon vendor. Like it can become a bit more than just the metrics.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Thanks for, thanks for clarifying that. That's really useful context. Now I want to go back to, I think I cut you off. You were talking about, you've got a list, you're going through it. I think you said, look, you're looking at the profitability by SKU to evaluate that whether a product is gated or not. I just want to, I think I cut you off. Was there anything else on that sort of checklist that you go through just to bring you back to that topic?
Zack Rubin
Yeah, thank you. There's Yeah, there's two other things. One is understanding the workload that's required around managing a seller account. So from a full time employee standpoint of forecasting, it's a different way of accounting, your customer service team. And then as you know, the gap has kind of closed, but for a really long time, vendor was really much It's gotten a little bit more cumbersome recently, but seller has historically been more difficult because you have to get more familiar with flat file uploads. There's just a lot more that goes on to the seller side.
So, not being aware of all of that can put you in a bad position if you just flip the switch, turn vendor off, and turn seller on. And then you're navigating through brand registry not knowing where to fix content. You have to go on to vendor to fix your content, even though the product's on seller. It can get a little bit messy and very time consuming.
And then the other one is, and I think this kind of gets missed, is on Amazon Vendor, because of the price matching, it hides a lot of your potential leaky distribution. Whereas when you're on seller, you may now be very aware of the 17 other sellers that are on your listing and where they're getting their inventory from. And so that's that's something that you just you never saw on. You don't you're not as privy to it because of the price matching. If Amazon vendor has the profitability to do so.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, quite a few changes there, obviously. To me, I'm thinking about resourcing, right? I mean, what sort of conversations do you have with vendors that say, we're transitioning? OK, that's great. It's more than just setting up a seller account and creating some shipments and sending it in there. We're talking about new capabilities that need to be built really in-house or by an agency. for that vendor in order to operate the 3P platform? I mean, what are the broad buckets there in terms of capability and resourcing that the vendor needs to essentially build up or bring in?
Zack Rubin
Depending on their maturity level and how big they are, their ERP is configured for a traditional wholesale model with accruals, where now, if it is an ERP that takes into account inventory, and also your financial aspects, you know, the inventory that you push into FBA is technically still your inventory until it is sold to the end customer.
And so like accounting is a little it is different. It is not just a little different. It is different. Operationally also different. So those are some big things to overcome. And then when it comes down to like process, and you went from being in a place where Amazon sent you a purchase order, and you filled it the way Amazon wanted it to.
Now you have to go and evaluate. Yeah, LTL, SPD, a small lesson truckload, small parcel delivery, how do you navigate the inbound fees? Do you want to leverage Amazon's AWD to get rid of your inbound fees? What about Amazon like global logistics? Like, how do I, you have to become this kind of expert in navigating your inbound because that is a big chunk of funds. Just playing around with a vendor the other day. I think it was an LTL for the same amount of units was $163 LTL versus about $800 SPD. That's a big difference in shipping just to get to the point where you can sell.
Paul Sonneveld
Lots of things to consider. I imagine as a vendor, it can be quite daunting and it's probably a process to walk them through. I'd love to share, and by the way, just a reminder for the audience, this is a live show and we're starting to get a few questions in. You can pop your questions in the comments box on LinkedIn and we've got some time at the end to go through them. So hang around for those.
Going back to the transition here, Zack, what's your typical experience of doing a transition? I'm wondering maybe if you can share a case study, you know, particularly around, I'm particularly interested in sort of the timings and how do you prepare and what goes first and what goes later. And I'm pretty sure this doesn't happen overnight, right? Or even within, within a week. So, um, no, if you will.
Zack Rubin: Yeah. I'd say in broad, broad months, a transition can easily take six to 12 months, and then depending on an ERP conversion, even longer to be fully transitioned. But I think the first two months, and these are kind of parallel paths that happen is one is setting up the account and making sure that you don't have any issues with gating. If that's already an issue, then you might have to circumnavigate it might be as easy as just getting an approval authorization letter or getting a little bit hacky and trying to figure out a new way of getting a seller account.
And the same path, you know, the first month or two, you're looking at your assortment, trying to understand how do you want to do it. Once you get to the green light of like, yeah, we want to do it. Then you've got to do another like two months of starting to sell down inventory in vendor and starting to not accept purchase orders for vendor. And while you're also starting to like really understand the seller operational process, building in your ASINs into your catalogue.
And then, the next couple months is once you're leaning down your inventory and seller and vendor is starting to kind of very like a clutch in a car is like you want to wean down as you give some gas. And so flipping inventory into FBA, if you have the ability to leverage like a drop-ship on your 1P account, you can stop placing, you know, fulfilling replenishment orders and just allow 1P drop ship. And then you can zero out the inventory.
And so that helps with kind of that transition, but it, it can take, uh, Four, six, eight months, definitely very easy. And there's always going to be learnings and kinks along the way that you've got to talk through. You'll never be more connected with your operation team than a transition, because you've got to talk through the expected time to get inventory on Monday, your shipment. When do you need it? And starting to think through their capabilities and how long it takes them to batch. So it is great for connectivity across the org. It's painful at times, but it's great.
Paul Sonneveld
Cross-functional teaming is super important by the sounds of it. So I think there's probably an organizational readiness question, which is, this requires a bunch of individuals from different functions really to hold hands and get the job done. I think it's really hard for one particular function to drive the change.
Zack Rubin
Well, I've done it in the past where it's been successful. And this is I forgot to mention this, where it was successful is we flipped over a heart-like within the pet space hard goods, a brand about four-ish years ago from vendor to seller. And what we did to make it really impactful was a couple of things. We did like a gimbal walk Kaizen type of situation where we went through and mapped out all the process flows and then actually like walked the experience to make sure that everybody knew what was going on.
but we also on like on the same time started to implement a map pricing policy. So that knowing that we had not been historically, you know, as tight with our distribution. And that's a process that can take easily a year to really start to wrangle. And then we also like, you know, well in advance of knowing we were going to make the move, we started to develop products that were more dimensionally appropriate for seller, knowing that in the horizon on the horizon, we may want to make that transition. And so that like really took a couple of the headaches off of our plate.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. That sounds like make the end much smoother, but a lot more like push the work up front, right? Do the work as you're considering it. Yeah. Great. Hey, we're at the half an hour mark, so we should wrap up, but we've got some great questions. So I want to just get to some of those. And for those that are listening, obviously we're starting to get into the nuts and bolts here. If you have another question, feel free to, now is probably your time to pop them in and I'll try and get Zack to give us his, and share his perspectives.
So let's pick one here. No particular order guys, but let's, I'm going here with a question from Natalie. Thank you so much for sending in your question, Natalie. Let me read it out. It's a long question. So we have both 1P and 3P accounts. The vendor manager is not letting us fully transition to 3P. We've had conversations with them with little to no results. We're also experiencing the brand health blocks gating via the 3P account. We have not fulfilled shipped any products via 1P in over a year. All sales are active via active ASINs and be lucky enough to list in 3P. The brand has been trying to terminate 1P and transition to 3P for about two years now. Any advice, or angles? thoughts on this question. Feel free to just read it again, Zack, because there's a lot there.
Zack Rubin
Yeah, yeah. So, recently went through something very similar with the exception of not having, you know, I didn't have a vendor manager who was not letting us transition. So, I guess the one thing is, and this is my experience, and this is my experience only, when I was a vendor manager, I don't recall like a button that allowed someone to transition, but I assume that must be somewhere in there because that is causing the gating.
So I couldn't, I would love to give you that advice, Natalie, that says, Hey, tell your vendor manager to, you know, Be more accommodating and click this button. I don't have that answer as far as everything else, from the best of my knowledge like it seems like Amazon links emails, IP addresses or potential most likely bank account statements Between a 1p and a 3p, is that I don't think there's anything proof there. That's my experience.
So it may be worthwhile evaluating different bank account or business entities. You know, this is sometimes unfortunately where some of the larger like brand accelerators come into play where they can take ownership of your, you can put their products onto their 3P account. One thing I would probably do Natalie is see if you can, if you have a friend in the business or you can message me later, try to add an ASIN to another 3P account. And just to see how widespread this like gating is. Not knowing your brand, if it's Nike, you might be SOL. But that might be an option as well.
Paul Sonneveld
I want to go back to a question from Ken. Again, it's a long one. Ken, thanks so much for your question. I know you wrote this really early on in the show, but thank you for that. Are there any pros or cons to doing a hard rejection for the ASINs that you don't want to ship to Vendor Central anymore?
I remember opening a ticket with an Amazon rep before, and they mentioned that we need to do a hard reject or Amazon systems won't stop placing POs for the same ASIN. Would you either discontinue obsolete or cancel suspend orders be better? Or what are your thoughts? So context, I'm assuming you really want to sell this ASIN via 3P, no longer supply it via 1P model. You know, if I'm going to start rejecting it, the rejecting the purchase orders for that, what is your advice on how to best do that?
Zack Rubin
I guess, Ken, I guess my question would be, is your goal trying just to get purchase orders from stopping, replace, even though you have marked them 1,000 ways from here to there as being dead, discontinued, end of life, whatever you want? If that's the case, then yes, doing a hard reject, and you'll have, I think it's like three weeks in a row where you hard reject it.
I've been told that works, but honestly, the way that the procurement system works is that if it eventually does see, even if you've hard rejected it, and you've done all these different things, if Amazon sees traffic demand customer interest. What it will do is it'll just push out purchase orders to anybody in the system that has that item. So even if it is a distributor or a wholesaler with a listing, it's just going to push things out there just to see what it can get. So if you're trying to just avoid the annoyances, I have yet to experience a silver bullet that has stopped purchase orders from an item that a customer is interested in ordering from ordering again.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you, Zack. I'm going to throw two last questions. Hopefully, we'll get some short answers. We're our way over time, but I do want to sort of do our audience justice. And I'm really grateful for the questions that are coming in. One question here by a LinkedIn user. Does the seller platform provide more in-depth data than vendor, brand analytics, geographical data? I think the answer there is yes. I would probably slightly sort of build on that question and say, you know, what are the things available in seller that you really value that you can't get in vendor?
Zack Rubin
Yeah, yeah, they are. The answer is yes. I think brand, I mean, I think vendor is starting to catch up. And they're always launching more things within brand analytics all the time. Recently, you know, they launched all the brand-tailored promotions where you could go and see your different kind of cohorts. And I think around that same time, they started to within brand analytics provide a little bit more information about that. And so now you can really go in and see. It's not the cleanest of a lifetime value, but you're able to see like which of these customers is more valuable for you.
So you can leverage the right promotions. It doesn't, I don't think we have the ability just yet. Maybe this is through DSP to like super hyper focus those cohorts. And I mean, I guess through DSP you could and find who are the top customers that you want to go after. But it really makes it quite easy for you to tell a story as to like, you know, how a sale on Amazon isn't just the return on ad spend on that product, but it then is like much more valuable. And so when you're talking to, you know, marketing teams and why your budget is towards what it is, I think that provides a little bit more data to support it.
Paul Sonneveld
Thanks, Zack. Last question. We spoke about it a little before, but let's go and build on that a little bit. It comes from Jordan. Thank you, Jordan. How can a vendor manager prevent you from transitioning?
Zack Rubin
Well, I'm never going to get a job at Amazon again, so I'll just tell you. So there's a process, and this is five years ago, so if things have changed, Like, please don't take my word for it. I haven't been there for five years. But there's a process like, and it involves a lot of different teams, including like the legal team. Cause I guess, I mean, in your contract, it does say, you can't have a seller account, uh, or some verbiage as of such.
But there's a really long process where the vendor managers, start to try to capture information. about chatting with their vendors about their seller account, this other team will provide information about how they've linked it, you get to select different phases where you have more, I guess, very open conversations about how they have a seller account.
And I think along that path and I never had to go this far so I can't speak about what happens after that. But I do think after that point there becomes a little bit more of like a actual gating process I can't speak to it because I only was able to go I only had to go so far with brands before getting them to not transition to seller. So I apologize Jordan for not being able to give you the end of the movie.
Paul Sonneveld
We think the caveats of the five-year piece, but yeah. Thank you for sharing that. That's really great. Unfortunately, we do need to wrap up now, so we're going to have to say goodbye. But before I do, Zack, I just want to pause and give you a huge thanks for being here, jumping on the show today, and really sharing your expertise. It's been super practical. You've done really a fantastic job in breaking down the complexities of how you transition, what are some of the barriers, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners are walking away with some really actionable insights.
Now, there might be those that are listening today and they just want to connect with you or get in touch to explore your services further or maybe discuss some of these topics in greater depth. What is the best way for them to respond to you or get in touch with you?
Zack Rubin
Yeah, you can email me at zack@red-tailconsulting.com. So that's Z-A-C-K. Oh, thank you so much. You can message me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to chat with anyone about anything that you have some questions or concerns with. Yeah, and help anyone navigate through these instances.
Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Zack. Really appreciate it. Take care.
Zack Rubin
All right. Thanks.
Paul Sonneveld
All right, everyone, that is it for today. As we close out this episode of Marketplace Masters, I want to thank you all for tuning in, especially those that tuned in live and wrote a whole series of questions and comments. Really, really appreciate it. That's what makes this show very, very special.
If today's discussion sparked your interest, make sure that you dive into our on-demand video library at merchantspring.io, where you'll find even more strategy and insights when it comes to Amazon Vendor. Of course, if you are ready to sharpen your analytics and drive even better decisions, whether it be vendor or seller, don't hesitate to reach out, drop me a message on LinkedIn. I'm here to help and see how MerchantSpring can really elevate your game.
And before we go, I'd love to hear from you. What topics do you want me to explore next? Send your ideas my way, and I will do my best to line up the right experts to dive in with us. Thank you again for joining us, and until next time, Stay ahead of the curve. Take care.
