Amazon Vendor Unpacked: Why Your Biggest Sales Channel Isn’t Always Your Most Important

Your largest retail account probably gets plenty of attention. It brings in the biggest orders, has an established relationship with the business and takes up a substantial part of the sales meeting. When you discuss growth, it is natural to start there.

But an account’s current size doesn’t tell you everything about its value. A smaller channel might help you enter a country where nobody knows your brand yet, understand how customers respond to a product or give a distributor a reason to take your next call. Those contributions can be difficult to capture in a monthly sales report, even when they are helping create the business’s next opportunity.

That is what makes Brett Smyth’s experience at Hengst useful for established manufacturers considering Amazon international expansion. In his conversation with Chris Khoo, Brett explains that Amazon isn’t the company’s largest sales partner, yet its importance to Hengst’s growth strategy extends well beyond its position in the revenue table.

“When you look at it in terms of importance, it’s right at the top.”
Brett Smyth, Hengst Filtration

For your business, the question is whether Amazon is being assessed against everything it contributes. If the conversation begins and ends with turnover, you may be overlooking how the channel supports market entry, customer understanding and wider retail relationships.

Watch the full Amazon Vendor Unpacked interview with Brett Smyth

What happens while you wait for the shelf?

A promising retail conversation can take a long time to become a sale. The buyer may like your product, the commercial discussion may be progressing and everyone may agree there is an opportunity, while the retailer’s planning cycle keeps the launch some distance away.

Brett describes lengthy shelf-planning cycles in Hengst’s US market and, in some cases, a further eighteen months between signing a contract and seeing products on shelves. Those timings reflect his experience in that market, but the underlying problem will be familiar to many manufacturers: you have already invested in the product, while the route to recovering that investment is moving at someone else’s pace.

That waiting period deserves a place in your growth planning. Alongside the potential size of an account, consider how long it will take to reach customers and what your business could learn in the meantime. A major retailer may eventually deliver substantial volume, but that doesn’t mean every other route needs to remain on hold until its shelves are ready.

Provided the product and business are ready for the market, Amazon can offer an earlier opportunity to start trading. The initial sales may be relatively modest, but they can begin answering questions that would otherwise remain assumptions: which products attract interest, what customers ask before buying and whether the offer makes sense to the audience you want to reach.

Turn early sales into something the next buyer can use

Retail buyers hear plenty of confident forecasts. Evidence of how customers have responded gives them something more substantial to discuss, particularly when you can explain the conditions behind the results.

Brett describes Amazon as a way to explore a market and support conversations with distribution partners:

“It allows you to test the market, test the product.”
Brett Smyth, Hengst Filtration

To make that useful, decide what you want to learn before launching. A sales total on its own leaves plenty unanswered, including whether demand continued after the introductory promotion, whether one product did most of the work and whether stock gaps affected the results.

Capturing the following information helps turn early trading into evidence your wider commercial team can use:

For Amazon Vendors, distinguish Amazon’s purchase orders from available consumer sell-through data, because a retailer buying stock and a shopper choosing the product tell you different things.

This gives your distribution team a stronger starting point. Instead of presenting a forecast supported mainly by confidence in the product, they can discuss observed demand, customer feedback and the support required to generate results. A launch driven by heavy promotion can still provide useful evidence, as long as that context travels with the numbers.

Your product page has to make up for the missing conversation

The value of customer feedback becomes especially clear when the product requires explanation. Hengst’s respiratory range serves people who need to understand what they are buying, and Brett emphasises making the product’s purpose clear early in their search.

In a trade store, customers may have familiar product groupings, staff advice and years of experience buying from the same counter. On Amazon, much of that guidance has to come from the page itself. A listing can contain accurate specifications and still leave someone uncertain about which variant they need or whether the item is suitable for their intended use.

Review the content around those decisions. The distinctions between products should be easy to find, with sizing, compatibility, intended use and supporting instructions explained where relevant. For protective equipment, those explanations must remain grounded in the manufacturer’s verified documentation.

International expansion makes this more demanding, because translating the words doesn’t necessarily make the buying decision clear. Terminology, familiarity with the product and the questions customers bring to it may differ between markets. The feedback you receive can therefore help improve both the Amazon listing and the information you later provide to retail partners.

A recurring question may be showing you where the product’s explanation needs work before you introduce it to a wider audience, making it valuable information for your content and commercial teams as well as customer service.

Demand can change the distribution conversation

Brett also describes a reversal of the usual route to market. A brand can begin selling through Amazon in a country where it lacks an established sales presence, then find that local distribution partners start taking an interest as the products become more visible.

That interest isn’t guaranteed, but it offers a useful perspective on the relationship between online and physical retail. Amazon activity can help create a conversation that the traditional route has struggled to open, particularly when potential partners can see customers already choosing and using the product.

To benefit from that, the people managing Amazon need to share what they are learning with the people developing distribution. If customers ask where they can buy locally, a particular product gains traction or a market starts showing consistent demand, those observations should reach the team responsible for the next commercial conversation.

They also need to arrive in a usable form. A concise market summary explaining the range, results, customer response and promotional support is more helpful than a dashboard full of unexplained figures. It allows a potential partner to assess the opportunity and ask informed questions about what would be needed to develop it further.

Give Amazon a clear place in the wider plan

For a business with established retail relationships, the challenge may be as much internal as commercial. Account managers can worry about competing for stock, distributors may question how online sales affect their position, and leadership may want faster growth without having resolved how the channels should work together.

Brett stresses the importance of a clear strategy and getting the business engaged in it. That starts with explaining the role Amazon is expected to play. An initial presence in a new territory, a route to customers with different buying habits and a source of evidence for future retail discussions are distinct objectives, even when they overlap.

Being specific gives colleagues and partners a better basis for discussing the decision. It also helps you assess progress. Revenue and profitability remain important, but an international expansion strategy should also examine what the activity has helped unlock: clearer market knowledge, improved product information, qualified distributor conversations or a stronger case for further investment.

Those outcomes need to be recorded carefully, so a promising enquiry remains distinct from a signed account and positive feedback isn’t treated as proof that a market will scale. The purpose is to recognise useful progress without inflating it.

Brett’s experience highlights why an established brand’s most important channel may be smaller than its biggest account. Amazon can get products moving while another route is still negotiating, help you learn from customers and make the next retail conversation better informed. When those are part of the job you need it to do, its value deserves a broader assessment than its current share of sales.

Watch Chris Khoo’s full conversation with Brett Smyth of Hengst