Website Closers® presents a phenomenal example of how to combine popular name brand products with eCommerce platforms that shoppers are eagerly using every day. The results for this 14-year-old brand have been tremendous, with sales skyrocketing for their selection of top brand-name sports apparel that include the hottest brands on the market today. Having products with a proven appeal and sales conducted exclusively on Amazon and eBay, this brand sprints ahead of the rest though their first-rate customer service that includes fast delivery, careful packaging, and rapid response times. Sales continue to reach record levels, with a whopping 30% Year-Over-Year growth rate in 2021 and an amazing 572% growth rate since 2015. This brand has become a textbook example of how to successfully compete on big name products on two highly competitive eCommerce sites and come out a top seller.
How did they get to this enviable position?
First, it’s important to put this company’s success into perspective. The Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns prompted a massive consumer shift in the way people shop, with online purchasing becoming the norm on a permanent basis for millions. Customers started flocking to Amazon in particular, pushing the platform’s market value from $900 billion in March 2020 to $1.8 trillion in July 2021. The number of customers logging onto Amazon for all their shopping needs continues to soar, with 74% of consumers actually starting their search for a product on Amazon.
While that sounds like great news for anyone who decides to become a seller on Amazon, the reality is that it takes a special sauce to become successful on the platform, something this company has an abundance of that will pass seamlessly to a new owner, which will in turn open even more opportunities for the new owner.
Launched in 2007, the company started by selecting a category of products – sports apparel – that was likely to attract a wide customer base and maintain steady, healthy sales year around. That strategy provided a wide selection of items to list, ranging from caps to backpacks, dress shirts, hoodies, polo shirts, and many more.
The company put together a network of more than 10 distributors for household brand products, each offering a unique product portfolio featuring thousands of available items to sell. That included many items known for being highly popular and seeing consistent high demand. In the last year, the company has tallied sales on more than 2,900 Amazon listings, with more than 440,000+ units sold with an average order value of $36. The company sells on Amazon.com, which now represent 90% of sales, with eBay.com taking the balance. Orders are quickly and conveniently shipped either through Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) which accounts for around 60% of Amazon orders or from the company’s warehouse utilizing Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM), which accounts for around 40% of Amazon orders.
Product research has been a major component to the success at this company. Over the past 6 years, a carefully cultivated list of highly profitable Amazon listings has been developed. That list has consistently grown each year, adding to the exponential sales growth and overall stability of the company. They identify products where the competition is limited, or products where they rank higher than competitors and increase those listings. This approach has worked spectacularly well. As a result, they now rank as Amazon’s Choice for a number of products and keywords associated with the products sold, as well as Best Sellers Badges in several categories, including Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry, and Sports & Outdoors.
Amazon customers have been responsive to this approach. One of their two Amazon stores boasts a 98 percent lifetime Seller Ranking, with the other rated at 93 percent.
Their product line is diverse making concentration a non-issue; their top selling item only represents 3.65% of total sales. Because they sell both summer and winter gear, seasonality is not a factor, and they enjoy steady sales of different items throughout the year. Sales do peak, however, over the holidays.
One of the company’s most impressive accomplishments is to have achieved this much success on the tremendously competitive platforms of Amazon and eBay and managed it without any advertising or marketing spend. The company has relied on the popularity and demand of their products complemented by the organic SEO provided by Amazon and eBay to take their listings to the top search results on those platforms. So far, this has proven to be effective, but it points to an enormous scale opportunity for this company.
The most promising option to expand would be launching the brand’s own Shopify website to drive direct consumer traffic and further diversify the sales platforms. More importantly, it would give the company an opportunity to launch an SEO program that included full optimization of their website, adding keywords to product descriptions, and launching a blog to boost organic traffic.
Customers could sign up to get emails about new products, and those emails could become the vehicle for a successful email marketing campaign. Social media marketing also offers this company a major growth option; photos of customers wearing their newly purchased clothing would be invaluable for word-of-mouth advertising. There are other proven scale options for this brand. The company now sells products internationally primarily on eBay and could expand onto Amazon’s platforms in Canada and the European Union to dramatically boost sales globally. The same could be done by launching sales onto other popular eCommerce sites such as Walmart and Target.
Finally, the company could expand its list of suppliers. That would add more top-rated brand names to their product line, dramatically increase the number of SKUs they market, and, based on past sales, send profits soaring.
This is a regular 40-hour-per-week operation, and the company has 6 full-time employees, including a team lead, 2 product procurement specialists, a primary picker, order packer and FBA shipment coordinator. They handle on average up to 100 customer service contacts a day.
Currently riding a crest of surging profit that shows no signs of slowing down, this brand grants a prospective buyer the ability to reap the full benefits of creating substantial revenue with little to no modification.
In the fiercely competitive world of online retail, cutting through the massive number of sellers targeting the same audience is no small task. What this company has accomplished with virtually no marketing is nothing less than astounding. The fact that digital marketing and an expansion of their sales channels represent such potentially lucrative methods for growth is a clear sign to any buyer of what a fantastic opportunity this offering is.
