Want To Get Bought Up? You Need To Diversify

If you’re selling on Amazon and haven’t heard of the Amazon aggregator trend, you’re missing out on a major potential payday.

Amazon aggregators are groups of investors who pool their funds to acquire and scale smaller but promising sellers on Amazon. If getting bought up is on your list of e-commerce goals, you should know that aggregators have a specific set of criteria they look for in potential investments.

These include:

• Brands that are highly niche or serve a very specific (and growing) market.
• Sellers who use Amazon FBA and are on the Amazon Brand Registry.
• Sellers with few SKUs but well-niched and high-selling products.
• Brands with a minimum valuation of $200k and a net margin of 10-15%.

But if you’re only selling on Amazon, you could drastically limit your ability to catch this rising e-commerce wave while it’s still building. Let’s take a closer look at how and why that is.

The Costs Of Limiting Your Business To Amazon

As we mentioned above, aggregators are more concerned with a seller’s trajectory than their present position in the market.

They definitely care about your present position too. But as long as your business has a strong growth trajectory, aggregators generally have the resources to scale a small-medium seller who’s doing well into a mega-seller who’s doing extraordinarily well.

So remember, the key to getting acquired is to prove to aggregators that your business has the wind in its sails, rather than just being the biggest player around. One of the best ways to do this is to diversify your income streams by adding Shopify to your e-commerce toolkit.

Amazon’s excellent, and we’re certainly not trying to throw shade here. But relying exclusively on Amazon for your revenue is a questionable move at best because:

• Amazon’s in charge of what happens on Amazon. Their business practices and policies could change at any moment, barring your company from selling on their website. Arbitrary account bans have even happened to well-established sellers, leaving them without an income overnight.
• Diversifying your income diversifies your risk. When you limit yourself to Amazon, you carry higher risk levels as you start to do better and better on their website. This is because it could all come crashing down at any moment. You should always seek to reduce your risk as your business becomes more successful. An overreliance on Amazon does the exact opposite.

And while it’s true that Amazon aggregators are looking for sellers that do at least 30% of their business through the platform, a well-executed diversification strategy is always a great selling point too.

After all, just as your business could be arbitrarily banned from Amazon at any moment while you owned it, that still holds for whoever acquires it.

ByteStand creates e-commerce solutions that help online sellers thrive. With the following three apps, you can quickly and seamlessly diversify your business onto Shopify, just in case Amazon gets a bit trigger-happy with their account ban policies.

And the best part of all? It just takes a couple of clicks: no manual data entry required.

ByteStand: Moving Has Never Been So Easy

Even in the age of digital commerce, moving from one store to another can seem like an overwhelming task.

You probably spent hours getting your inventory exactly how you wanted it on Amazon. No wonder you’re a bit hesitant to repeat the process on a new platform. But guess what? You don’t have to.

We built ByteStand to be ridiculously simple:

• Transfer everything in just a couple of clicks. That way, you can spend more time selling and scaling your business to get bought up, rather than getting tied down with administrative and logistical issues.
• Lose nothing in translation. At Bytestand, we’re detail-oriented. You won’t lose an ounce of your store’s inventory data during the transfer process. Prices, product images, and everything else will be right there on Shopify waiting for you (and your customers).
• Harness the power of automation. We understand the power of professionalism. Manual data entry causes more mistakes, which looks extremely unprofessional to your customers. ByteStand uses automation to instantly transfer all your store’s data with 100% accuracy.

What more do you need to hear? Diversify your business today.

SnapSync: Keep Everything Perfectly In Sync

Even though we strongly encourage e-commerce professionals to diversify their income streams, we acknowledge that it can be tricky to keep multiple digital stores in perfect alignment.

That’s why we created SnapSync. It takes care of all the work of keeping your prices and inventory synced up across Shopify and Amazon, so you can reap the revenue of multiple ecommerce stores but not deal with any of the headaches involved.

With SnapSync, you can:

• Skip the learning curve. If you’re noticing a theme here, you’re spot on. We’re all about simplicity. SnapSync is unbelievably easy to set up and even has in-app guides or live phone support if you have additional questions.
• Reach customers anywhere. One simple app lets you streamline and manage multiple Amazon and Shopify stores right from your phone or laptop.
• Enjoy pricing peace of mind. We automagically sync and update pricing and inventory information across your stores, so you’ll never over sell or under sell again.

SnapSync makes it simple to succeed across a widely distributed ecommerce network, which will make you even more attractive to Amazon aggregators. No matter where you are and no matter where your customers are, we turn e-commerce diversification from a chore into a joy.

FBA Shipping: Shopify + Amazon = Magic

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is one of the significant perks of selling on Amazon, with benefits like fast and discounted shipping, managed returns, and limitless storage space for your inventory.

The FBA Shipping app from ByteStand seamlessly leverages Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) program to:

• Simplify the way you do business forever. Another one of our recurring themes is automation–or, as we like to call it, automagic. FBA Shipping will make sure that Amazon automagically ships your Shopify orders, with zero effort required on your end.
• Make your customers happy. Your customers will get instant updates when their orders are confirmed, when they go out for shipping, and on arrival. FBA Shipping scans for product updates every five minutes, so your customers are always up to date.
• Go easy on your wallet. Surprisingly, Amazon charges less to ship Shopify orders than it does to ship Amazon orders. So by fostering cross-business at Shopify or encouraging your Amazon customers to check out your Shopify store, you’ll be saving money on shipping.

Shipping is often one of the biggest hassles in the e-commerce process. But it doesn’t have to be.

Expand Your Horizons For A Big Payout

It’s true that Amazon aggregators look for businesses with a majority of their customers on Amazon, hence the name. But they also value sellers with an established diversification strategy.

To learn more about what ByteStand can do to help you get acquired, check out our blog below.