Does your list of resellers look like this? How does this hurt your brand?

Some companies are overwhelmed by the bombardment that they are receiving in today’s thriving and growing e-commerce world. This caused them to take an approach of accepting any/every wholesale application they receive. Based on the popularity of you products, there are more online sellers reaching out to you every week wanting to purchase your products for resale. Initially, this will be a great boost in your sales revenue. It will make you feel great. You may need to take a step back and take a longview approach to you brand. Does this approach have an impact on the future of your brand? It is often a negative long-term impact for brands that have this open policy. Once things get out of control, it is hard to get back under control. Limiting online sellers is a must, but you do not want to eliminate all your online sellers.

Benefits of limiting your Amazon sellers include:

1 - Controlling Your Brand Image

Your brand's image online can be negatively impacted by many factors: poor quality images, limited information on the listing's bullet points and descriptions, negative product reviews. These areas can and will be missed without the correct sellers. Keeping listings up-to-date, optimized, and top tier can take time, energy, knowledge, and financial resources. Your products deserve a listing that shows the quality of the product. The quality of the listing can increase the conversion of views to actual sales. These sales will in turn lead to product reviews. Now more than every, these product reviews are very valuable in a customer's buying decisions. Many customers will view Amazon product reviews while they are shopping at brick and mortar stores to decide whether or not to make a purchase. By limiting your sellers, the authorized sellers will be able to apply more of their time and resources to improving your product pages and monitoring reviews.

2 - Controlling Product Pricing

MAP violators will cause many issues for your brand. Please see below:

1) They will cost you sales on your own online store.

2) They will cost your other online sellers sales on their other online stores.

3) They will hurt your relationships with brick and mortar stores as they realize that they can't sell as many of your products due to the devaluing of your products that is being allowed online.

By controlling your MAP, you will have the "pick of the litter," when choosing whom to allow to resale your products online. This controlled pricing removes much of the risk, volatility, and uncertainty that these sellers often experience.

3 - More Time and Resources to Focus on Growth

When you have many sellers on your products, you are creating more work for your company. For each of these sellers, you will most likely prepare invoices, shipments, back and forth communication through emails and phone calls, etc. By dealing with a limited number of sellers, you could substantially lower your companies' time being used on these mundane tasks that provide no growth to your company. This will save you money on shipping and labor hours spent performing these tasks.

4 - Increase Sales Through Advertising

The Amazon BuyBox accounts for 80%+ of the total sales on Amazon. The BuyBox will rotate through your sellers, giving them approximately the same percentage of the sales, if their pricing matches. If you have limited sellers who will match each other's price, and run Pay Per Click advertising 100% of the time, you will see an increase in sales volume.

A company that does all of these items listed above, will only want to work with a value add partner/value add reseller (VAR). Value add partners will see the commitment that the brand has to its products, and appreciate the opportunity to sell these products. In return, the value add partner will provide additional value to the brand as other pain points come up.

You don't want the cluttered, blurry image of your online sellers shown earlier in this post. You want the image below. You want a small group that works collectively as a group to benefit the group as a whole.