Questions?

With over 300 million shoppers and 40% of total US ecommerce revenue in 2020, Amazon is the largest US ecommerce platform. Even when customers purchase elsewhere, shoppers report researching products and reviews on Amazon twice as often as on Google. With its steadily increasing market share, analysts expect that Amazon will capture a large portion of future ecommerce growth supported by large investments in fulfillment centers, prime memberships, and extensive product selection. The enormous opportunity on Amazon attracts third party sellers who often use Amazon’s ungated marketplace structure to resell other brands, causing margin pressure and negative brand perception. Brands that take direct ownership of their Amazon marketplace presence create quality brand experiences, protect their omnichannel margins, and capture revenue growth directly.

It’s often easiest for large brands to sell to Amazon (1P) instead of through Amazon (3P). Since Amazon 1P does not honor MAP, brands who sell Amazon 1P lose control of pricing and margins. This structural misalignment of incentives is an existential issue for brands because it erodes margins off Amazon and strains relationships with key retail outlets. Merkato eliminates this structural conflict by owning the transition process from 1P to 3P and using innovative strategies to control price, distribution, and product assortment. Once the 3P selling model has been established, we programmatically monitor and eliminate cross-channel pricing conflicts and remove unauthorized sellers. Ultimately, Merkato guarantees MAP pricing, gives brands strong margins, and protects brands’ multichannel lines of business.

To improve margins, Merkato optimizes each point across the selling process. We track buybox win rates and product pricing across all ecommerce marketplaces and deploy unique solutions to prevent cannibalization. Our team creates custom demand-based inventory forecasts to minimize storage fees while maintaining stock levels to meet demand. We create an optimized mix of FBA, FBM, and 1P fulfillment to balance minimal shipping costs with the increased discoverability and revenue benefit of selling FBA. Finally, we build granular advertising reporting, dynamic bidding, and optimization rules that allow us to reduce the cost of driving revenue with paid advertising.

Absolutely. Our team creates product imagery and SEO-optimized product descriptions to enhance brand perception and drive revenue on Amazon. We develop high-quality detail page copy, enhanced brand content, promotional product images, and prevent listing suppression by staying up to date with Amazon’s ever-changing creative requirements. We also offer creative services for brand store pages, including design layout, promotional copy and seasonal page updates.

Merkato helps brands create a full-funnel advertising strategy by combining on-site ad formats like Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads with our unique access to Amazon DSP. This approach helps us drive more revenue and ROI by moving shoppers through the entire marketing funnel, from awareness to purchase. Our team also incorporates off-Amazon advertising on social media networks like Facebook and Instagram and on other ecommerce marketplaces like Walmart, Lowes, HomeDepot, and eBay.

Brands that sell 1P sell to Amazon while brands that sell 3P sell directly to consumers through Amazon. Historically, many large enterprises initially chose 1P because it was more familiar to the brands experienced with traditional brick and mortar retail. However, selling 1P causes brands to lose control of product pricing, catalog assortment, brand experience, and ultimately revenue growth. Selling 3P allows brands to maintain control of the price, margins, and brand experience because they are selling directly to consumers. However, selling 3P is more complex and labor intensive than 1P, and most in-house teams don’t have the bandwidth to take on this additional workload. Merkato brings brands the price protection and revenue growth benefits of selling 3P while handling all the implementation workload.

Driving revenue on ecommerce marketplaces requires strong quantitative, analytical, and marketplace-specific skills known as Operational Marketing and Quantitative Advertising. General digital marketing skills are inadequate because Amazon’s marketplace dynamics and walled data gardens render traditional digital marketing tools and tactics ineffective. Merkato specializes in executing operational and analytical ecommerce marketing and is founded and led by former Amazonians and Googlers. Our teammates have profitably invested $550M+ in quantitative advertising for hundreds of brands and have managed dozens of brands' marketplace operations full-service. In our experience, in-house teams are happy for us to handle the Operational Marketing and Quantitative Advertising required to run ecommerce marketplaces. This frees up internal marketers to work on branding, strategy, customer research, owned channels, and synchronizing marketing activities across all touchpoints.

We offer a performance-based pricing structure with starting fees roughly equivalent to the fully-burdened cost of a mid-senior level employee. Unlike traditional agencies that charge hourly or markup media spend, we’re confident in our ability to drive revenue growth. We have skin in the game and proactively manage every aspect of brands’ marketplace operations, and our incentive-aligned, multi-year partnership structure means we only win when our clients do.