James Thomson is the Managing Partner at Equity Value Advisors, where he advises brand executives and investors on accelerating e-commerce revenues and aligning distribution and pricing strategies. He serves on the boards of and invests in companies such as Mamenta, Davinci Micro Fulfillment, and MAVI.io. Previously, James was the Chief Strategy Officer at Buy Box Experts, a managed services agency that assists brands in optimizing their online sales channels as well as investors of businesses selling on Amazon. Before Buy Box, he served as the Business Head of Amazon Services, the division responsible for recruiting tens of thousands of sellers annually to the Amazon marketplace, and he was the Senior Manager for Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [0:00] James Thomson discusses Amazon’s true nature as a data company, not just a marketplace
- [3:45] How Amazon uses first-party data to shape customer experiences and advertising strategies
- [12:50] Amazon’s role in the social commerce space
- [15:48] Why Walmart struggles to dominate Amazon’s e-commerce market share
- [24:49] The challenges in-store retail brands face when selling on Amazon
- [27:52] How competitive brands dominate Amazon’s search results and disrupt established brands
- [36:00] James talks about innovating and adapting to the Amazon ecosystem
- [44:15] Why James prioritizes family time
- [47:06] James’ question for Amazon CEO Andy Jassy: Why did Amazon wait so long to bring employees back to the office?
In this episode…
Amazon has evolved beyond just a marketplace; it is now a data-driven company that leverages first-party consumer insights to dominate digital advertising. As generative AI reshapes online shopping, Amazon uses its vast data resources to enhance customer experiences, refine search results, and expand its advertising reach. How can retail-first brands break into this competitive space?
While Walmart remains a major player in retail, its e-commerce strategy differs significantly from Amazon’s. Rather than directly competing, Walmart focuses on converting its in-store shoppers into online customers, leveraging its physical presence to drive digital growth. However, many traditional retail brands struggle to adapt to Amazon’s algorithm-driven marketplace, where competitor brands thrive by optimizing keywords, pricing competitively, and constantly innovating. According to Amazon veteran James Thomson, brands that invest in data-driven decision-making, continuously refine their product listings, and adapt to Amazon’s evolving algorithms can increase visibility and outperform competitors.
In this episode of What The Teck?, James Thomson, the Managing Partner at Equity Value Advisors, joins Rolando Rosas to discuss the shifting dynamics of Amazon’s online marketplace. He explains Amazon’s evolving role in social commerce, how Amazon uses first-party data to influence customer experiences, and the importance of blocking out your calendar for family time.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Rolando Rosas on LinkedIn
- Dave Kelly on LinkedIn
- Global Teck Worldwide
- Circuit Loops
- James Thomson on LinkedIn
- Colin Raja on LinkedIn
- RIMSports on Amazon
- “Digital Marketing Master Neil Patel: ‘They will CRUSH you if you DON’T…’” on What The Teck?
- Neil Patel: Website | LinkedIn
- Nick Gezzar on LinkedIn
Quotable Moments:
- “Amazon isn’t just a marketplace; it’s a data company that knows more about you than you realize.”
- “Success on Amazon isn’t about brand recognition; it’s about mastering keywords, pricing, and continuous innovation.”
- “Retail brands struggle on Amazon because they don’t adapt; the rules online are entirely different.”
- “If you’re not improving your product with every order, your competitors will do it for you.”
- “Protect your calendar; if you don’t set boundaries, someone else will dictate how you spend your time.”
Action Steps:
- Optimize your Amazon listings for search visibility: Using strategic keywords and high-quality images ensures your product ranks higher, increasing organic traffic and conversions.
- Continuously analyze search query performance: Monitoring keyword rankings and click shares helps you refine your PPC and SEO strategies for better ad efficiency and lower costs.
- Adapt retail strategies for Amazon’s algorithm: Traditional branding isn’t enough; success requires data-driven pricing, competitive positioning, and continuous listing optimization.
- Regularly improve product offerings based on customer feedback: Iterating on design, packaging, or instructions keeps your products competitive and addresses market demands.
- Prioritize calendar protection for work-life balance: Blocking personal time ensures you maintain focus on priorities and prevent work from dominating your schedule.
Sponsor for this episode…
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Episode Transcript:
James Thomson 0:00
Amazon’s not really a marketplace. It’s not even a place to shop. It’s really a data company. Amazon knows more about everything you’ve ever searched for, everything you’ve ever looked at, everything you’ve ever purchased. They know more about you than you think you know about yourself. And as a data company, with certain types of data that nobody else has, that typically gets most consumers really freaked out at times. It’s a little scary to think that
Intro 0:24
James Thomson is an e-commerce advisor and was the first Fulfillment by Amazon FBA account manager. James co founded the PROSPER show, the top conference for Amazon sellers, the author of two books and his expertise helps brands thrive in this challenging ecosystem. If
Rolando Rosas 0:40
you had an opportunity to sit down with Andy Jesse tomorrow, what’s the one question you would ask?
James Thomson 0:45
Why did you wait so long to require people to come back to the office? Wow, how do we continue to solve really hard problems? I don’t know how you do that with everybody working out of their homes in different locations.
Rolando Rosas 0:58
James, can I challenge you a little bit on that? How to say this without
James Thomson 1:00
being very unpopular. The problem that Andy Jassy, I think, is trying to solve is, turns out, if you want to be a leader, you want to motivate people. The way you do it is, you ask the right question. If you ask the right question, all things are uncovered.
Rolando Rosas 1:15
How does that happen? That challenger brands are on page one. James, what’s going on here?
James Thomson 1:21
You ready? We can go down so many fast here.
Rolando Rosas 1:27
Welcome to What The Teck?, your gateway to business strategies and tech secrets shaping today’s workplace. You know, change is something we can’t avoid, and when it comes to what’s happening in tech and in the world of Amazon, there’s one person that is ideally suited to tell us from a low tech as well as some future check that may come. I’m gonna probe him a little bit on this, on what’s coming down the pipeline. That person is no other than James Thomson, former Amazonian, and someone that is an authority figure in the Amazon space, in the Amazon world, I want you to welcome to the podcast. James Thomson,
James Thomson 2:13
Rolando how are you delighted to be joining you today? Thank you. Well,
Rolando Rosas 2:18
thank you. It looks so nice and green behind you. For those that are just listening on the audio side of the podcast teams is sitting at home with wonderful, lush trees behind them. You’re in the state of Washington, right? I
James Thomson 2:32
am in a suburb of Seattle, so my goodness, I ended up out here many years ago. Ended up fortunate enough to work at Amazon for a number of years. And when my time at Amazon was done, I was thrilled to be able to stay here and call this my home. It’s
Rolando Rosas 2:46
beautiful, beautiful country. I love going out west, particularly out in the Seattle area. I just I love the trees and the greenery. It’s hard to beat it. Some of that is why I wanted to talk to you today. If we think of back a couple of years ago, 2020, 2019, the world looked different. The world as we knew it was operating under different premises. And today, if we were to look at how fast our Amazon world is changing when you talk about the rise of generative AI, the fall of the aggregators, the tension between Amazon sellers and Amazon, and then you look at Amazon becoming a huge player globally in digital ad sales, now rising to the number three position, only behind Facebook and meta. How do you explain this crazy world to, let’s say, friends or family they have no understanding of what it’s like being in this Amazon space and bubble.
James Thomson 3:45
Most people who are familiar with Amazon, and I hope that’s just about everybody, think of Amazon as a place where you go and you buy a bunch of stuff. And yes, Amazon started off as a place where we go and we buy things. It turns out Amazon’s first and foremost not really a marketplace, it’s not even a place to shop, it’s really a data company. And when you think about what it means to be a data company, you think about all the different types of data that Amazon collects on consumers, and then how Amazon uses that data to turn it around and leverage it, both for its own purposes, helping itself create better experiences for customers, as well as, how do you use data to sell better advertising or to target customers in a better way? I’ll bet you, Amazon knows more about you and what you like to buy and what you like to shop for. At times, it’s a little scary to think that you know, as this AI now is rolling out, you’re going to start to see incredibly customized product offerings showing up every time you go on Amazon. Amazon knowing who maybe you need that red sports car driving gloves, and you’re like, I don’t know how they knew that. Well, the reality is, as Amazon knows more and more about everything you’ve ever searched for on Amazon, everything you’ve ever looked at. Everything you’ve ever purchased, the prices at which you purchase these things. There’s an awful lot that you can infer from that, and it gives Amazon the ability to know not only who you are today, but what you’re likely going to need in the future. Amazon doing Amazon pharmacy, for example, it’s not going to be long before Amazon says We know you’re buying those medications to help you with this problem, and that maybe you need to start thinking about these other health products over here on the other side of the marketplace. At the end of the day, Amazon is a data company, and as a data company with certain types of data that nobody else has, it gives Amazon an opportunity to participate in spaces and do things better than anybody else. That’s the exciting stuff that I see coming down the pipe in the next few years. Yes, Amazon’s a big advertiser right now, but they’re first party data that tells them who you are and what you’re interested in. Nobody else has this level of granularity, and as Amazon gets better at finding new channels where they can promote their video advertising, they’re going to be in a position where they’re going to continue to grow, and I suspect they could be the number one advertiser within the next 10 years, just by way of being able to leverage that first party data, just
Rolando Rosas 6:07
a lot to unpack there, because you’ve talked about customers, you’ve talked about ads, you’ve talked about the integration of data and the role it plays in preferences that Amazon’s gonna serve. Because as a seller on Amazon, I could see how that can be a problem for us as a company selling on Amazon, because our interests aren’t always aligned with Amazon, and I know that right now, as a topic of discussion, there’s a lot of folks in the community talking about just that, and they’re afraid, because I can’t control what those results are going to be like when somebody’s searching for something, because Amazon may not find me relevant. Talk about where you see that going, because Amazon’s already started rolling AI as a way to query products. They’ve announced a couple of different things at their Amazon accelerate conference. And like you said, the future looks different because it may serve up preferences based on my past is that something that’s happening today or something that’s coming down the line? So Amazon’s been leveraging
James Thomson 7:07
its data about you and your search behavior and your purchase behavior. They’ve been doing that for many, many years. Things like aI only help to refine the ability for Amazon to take all that data, crunch it down and say, What does Rolando want to see next? So AI as a new technology, I view that more as a way for Amazon to enhance the data they already have and to bring out the value in that data. So to your question around, has Amazon already been using this data absolutely they know more about you than you think you know about yourself, and that’s okay. You also ask this question about as a seller, does it make you nervous that Amazon has all this data? Philosophically, it’s a little bit of a challenging question to answer, because if you’re not on Amazon, you’re probably doing a direct to consumer site, or you’re doing some other marketplace. But the reality is, Google knows a whole lot about customers, and they use that information to figure out how your Google ads are gonna surface relative to everybody else’s. And now the Walmart is doing advertising, and some of the other marketplaces, obviously, are collecting search data and purchase data. They’re also making decisions through their algorithms around whether your product is gonna show up in the place that you want it to show up. Amazon’s just big they have a lot more data than most other companies, and so they’re in a position where we do get nervous about just how much data do we want one company to have, but at the end of the day, as a seller, I can’t think of a better place to be than on Amazon if my objective is to get in front of more customers. Yes, there’s a trade off. Yes, Amazon will continue to collect my data just as they would collect your data as a seller. But if I’m on DTC site of my own. If I’m a Shopify site and I’m leveraging Google advertising, or I’m leveraging meta to do some kind of social media advertising, they’re all collecting information as well about me, about my customers, about my own purchases. So yeah, the reality is, there’s going to be some big company out there that’s going to learn more about my company and my customers and their preferences, as much as I would love to control that information, the reality is somebody else is also going to have that information available, and the power of data is having more of it than the next guy and being able to figure out how to condense it down to find insights that you can only find because you have lots of data versus having one seller’s worth of data or one customer’s data.
Rolando Rosas 9:22
Let’s talk about lots of data. This gets a lot of air time when people start going into the data question. I’ve even heard you say this in other interviews that people get nervous about that. If you’re looking at it from a customer standpoint, they say, James, I don’t know if I’m comfortable with Amazon being not just holding that data, but sharing it with different parties. What do you see the future looking like if we’re moving to a more AI future, big data kind of centric from the business standpoint, but customers saying James, that’s a little if we use a gen one. The new gens, Gen a, I’m getting the X from that you’ve got kids, so you probably have heard that term. I’m getting the X from what you’re saying, James. So let’s talk about
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