How Amazon Built its Merchant Selling Platform | John Rossman

Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

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:

• John Rossman’s LinkedIn and Twitter
• The Amazon Way Book
• The Amazon Way Website
• Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter

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