Amazon.......Why I Quit Prime

Maybe call this a rant or a warning for small businesses looking to dip their toe into the world of Amazon.

 

A couple of years ago bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, we decided to start selling Etto products on Amazon. We figured at best, Amazon is your friendly everything store that gives us access to a huge customer base and at worst it's a utility that delivers goods into nearly every home through a virtual pipeline. In full disclosure, I've been a Prime member for years and understand that shopping locally is better, but sometimes it's not possible or practical for certain items and Amazon makes it easy.

 

We found a local consultant to help us get started with all things Amazon. We could have done this ourselves, but I generally prefer involving experts or the best-informed people to make things happen faster and better. In this case we started the process in the Summer of '24 with the hope of getting our pasta and some ancillary items ready for the holiday season. Why not offer our pasta to folks through a variety of channels and build brand exposure too. It was an exciting time and once we were set up I even promoted ordering through Amazon to our customers (like you), and many of you did. 

 

For a while things seemed to progress as planned and more orders flowed through this channel and we thought this could significantly boost our business. The truth about growing a small CPG (Consumer Package Goods) business like ours is that the margins when we distribute our pasta are very small, sometimes amounting to nothing at all to bigger grocery stores. Amazon gave us some hope that even with small margins significant volume and Amazon fulfillment could help the bottom line. Then one day, after we filled the Amazon pipeline and got our pasta into many of their distribution centers everything changed..........their storage fees tripled. I still don't know why or how this change happened, but it did. Soon, our meager profits suddenly became sizable losses. I also started noticing that around this time the "normal" products offered on Amazon started becoming more scarce and the available brands seemed like some kind of brain fog mashup with names like REESTECCI, TECHICOOK and ADILSWIL. Are these names you can trust?

 

As quickly as we could we pulled all of our products from Amazon at a significant expense with lots of time as you can imagine. Since most of the boxes we got back were damaged we could not resell them, instead, we used them as samples or for donations. I also noticed the campaign touting the Amazon marketplace as a place for small businesses to succeed and a way for folks like you to buy from small businesses - clever. After our experience I don't see how anyone can succeed in this channel beyond Amazon.

 

We still have listings on Amazon, but fulfill orders from the site ourselves. This is the most expensive place to buy Etto pasta and hopefully folks will recognize this and just visit our website to order. What we've learned is that Amazon's promise isn't true; with just a little more time and effort nearly every item sold on Amazon can be purchased elsewhere for the same or even better pricing, resulting in a better outcome for the small business that makes it. If you want to order our pasta from Amazon we will ship it to you. However, if you order it directly from our website we will also ship it to you with better pricing better margins for us and often free shipping. 

 

And after all this I decided to cancel my Amazon Prime account. If you never hear from me again assume an Amazon drone plucked me off the street and took me to their leader. Thanks for all your support of Etto and please visit our website.

Last week our chef, Marc LeDuc was invited to prepare a dish as guest chef at EMRE , the newish restaurant at the Ava hotel. He made a duck ragu with Mighty Cap mushrooms and it was fantastic. I hope some of you were able to try it. I'll see if he can put it on our menu soon.