Ty Roney is an expert at marketing through Amazon, but he started as an online toy seller.

He was basically using Amazon as a platform to create a traditional toy store. He chose inventory, put items into an Amazon storefront, and competed with other people who were doing the same thing with the same products. That approach made sense when there was a toy store in one town and another toy store in another town down the road. Parents wanted to be able to buy the trendy toy for their own kids at their local toy store, and the owner of that toy store made toys available to the parents.

On Amazon, though, it meant multiple sellers competing with each other for sales of identical products to the same customers.

“It really became a data-driven game,” Roney says, and he was successful with it, but wasn’t satisfied.

“I wasn’t providing a whole lot of value to the marketplace,” Roney says of his days as a reseller at Amazon. He was a middleman for distributers, and with or without him the products he sold were still available to consumers.

That changed when Roney began selling unique products directly for manufacturers. It changed even more when he began working with the team at Elemerce, an agency working specifically with manufacturers who want their products to succeed at Amazon.

“Amazon is an ecosystem,” Roney says. Just as getting on the shelves at brick and mortar mass market retailers is complex and can even be dangerous for smaller CPG companies, getting on the shelf at Amazon requires specialized skills and knowledge. Helping and supporting innovative CPG companies to launch new products or expand the distribution of their niche products extended the choices provided to consumers, extended the value provided by Amazon, and brought the manufacturers greater exposure and distribution. Everybody wins.

Amazon is now the largest retailer in the world by some measures, and it’s certainly the largest online retailer in the world. The bar to entry into the Amazon marketplace is low, but the chance of failure is high for CPG companies who don’t have the specialized knowledge required to succeed at Amazon.

Ty Roney will be sharing some of his specialized insights at the fall CPG School, October 21st, 2015, in Bentonville. This is just one example of the kind of expertise you’ll encounter at CPG School. Just as Roney feels more satisfied in his work when he can add value, we at Selling to the Masses feel more satisfied when we can provide a great experience for the early-stage CPG companies we work with, and CPG School is one of the ways we accomplish that. Read more and register.