Y Buy at Retail
Five years selling brand-name watches, electronics and perfume below retail, as one of the few merchants Amazon invited into its Pro Merchant program.
A discount destination in a trust business
Selling brand names below retail is the easiest promise to make online and the hardest to be believed making. The categories this business chose, watches, electronics and perfume, are the three most counterfeited categories on the internet. Every shopper arrives assuming the discount hides a catch.
So the job was never just traffic. It was building a destination that a stranger would hand a credit card to, and then getting that destination in front of people at the exact moment they were searching for a discount they did not quite trust.
Watches
The category where authenticity anxiety is highest and margin is best.
Electronics
High consideration, heavily price-compared, unforgiving on delivery.
Perfumes
Small, repeatable, and gift-driven, which makes seasonality the whole game.
Gross profit margin
Held at up to $100,000 a month in sales. Discount positioning usually buys volume by giving the margin away. This one kept both.
Invitation only.
The business traded as a contractual Pro Merchant partner of Amazon.com, a tier merchants could not apply into. Amazon extended it, and it came with the scrutiny you would expect: performance, authenticity and fulfilment all measured continuously. Losing it was always one bad quarter away, and it never happened across five years.
Top five, for years, on the phrase that mattered
Organic search did the acquisition. The site held the 1st through 5th positions on both Google and Yahoo for “Brand Name Below Retail”, and at its peak sat at 2nd and 3rd out of 6.7 million competing results.
Google and Yahoo
Positions 1 to 5Selling something people can buy cheaper elsewhere?
Then search position and margin are the same problem. We will look at what you sell, what it costs you to acquire a customer, and where the winnable phrases actually are.