How Amazon Built its Merchant Selling Platform | John Rossman

Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

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3+ y ago 1:01:15

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Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with John Rossman. They talk about how the Merchants@ program was built from scratch, why working directly with third party sellers prompted the principle of seller obsession, launching the Apparel and Sporting Goods categories, developing smaller teams within the retail organization, and essentially, how Amazon’s Leadership Principles led the way to writing his book, “The Amazon Way”.

John Rossman is the former Director of Merchant Integration and Enterprise Services at Amazon. He spearheaded the launch of the Merchants@ program, one of the largest B2B networks with thousands of sellers, offering products in new categories such as apparel, sporting goods, consumer electronics, health and beauty, and home.

Episode Resources:

What to Listen For:

00:00 Intro
02:39 What is the Merchants@ Program?
04:41 Prior to Amazon, John was in a startup technology company
09:04 While there was Customer Obsession, they needed to create Seller Obsession
12:43 Inventory and catalog refreshes from daily to hourly
14:06 Account management team within the retail organization
15:51 Engineering and design work for customer and seller experience
17:43 Gently enforcing the parity clauses of the seller agreements
19:03 Building a three-option integration path for sellers
22:36 Working directly with third party sellers
24:30 The big launch for the Apparel category, followed by Sporting Goods
27:31 The evolution of Item Matching
30:59 Knowing when to have and not to have patience on something
31:49 A big no to “handshake’ credit card deals to maintain customer trust
34:15 Self service registration, so that seller’s could register without talking to anyone
35:50 Product promotions and processing refunds
38:26 Merchant.com was essentially a business outsourcing arrangement
41:44 Classification is one of the tricky parts in creating a great customer experience
44:17 M.com business wasn’t winning
45:41 How "The Amazon Way" book came to be
47:41 Being good has never been the bar at Amazon
49:36 Truly understand the nature of experimentation in the business
51:42 Getting clarity in your thinking and getting senior leaders to sit down and listen
54:36 Startups should focus on instrumentation and metrics
56:36 You don't want to scale when you don't understand your unit cost basis

15 episoder

#Careers #Entrepreneur #Business #Dave Schappell #Amazon #History #Innovation #Inventions