Amazon Vendor Unpacked: Is Your Amazon Business Growing, or Just Keeping Up?

Growth is usually treated as a reassuring number. If sales are up, revenue has increased year on year and Amazon is contributing more to the business than it did twelve months ago, it is easy to assume the channel is moving in the right direction.

But in the latest Amazon Vendor Unpacked, Chris Khoo, CEO of KhooCommerce, speaks with Andy Banks, CEO of Venture Forge, about why that assumption can be misleading. One of the most useful questions to come out of their conversation is also one of the simplest: what if your Amazon business is growing, but the market around you is growing faster?

▶ Watch the full Amazon Vendor Unpacked session with Chris Khoo and Andy Banks

That question takes the conversation beyond basic year-on-year reporting and into something much more useful for established Vendors: whether the business is actually strengthening its position, or simply growing because the market itself is getting bigger.

Growth only means something when you understand the context

Andy gives the example of a brand whose Amazon business had grown by 15% year on year. Viewed in isolation, that is a very healthy result and exactly the kind of figure that would usually make its way into a positive monthly or quarterly report.

The wider category, however, had grown by 28%.

Brand growth vs category growth

Measure	Year-on-year growth
Brand	15%
Category	28%

Your sales can be growing while your market position is weakening.

The important point here is not that 15% growth should suddenly be considered poor performance. It is that the number only becomes meaningful once it is compared with what is happening around it.

Most internal Amazon reporting naturally looks backwards. Teams compare this month with last month, this year with last year, or actual sales against forecast. Those measures are useful, but they do not necessarily tell you whether competitors are moving faster, whether the category is expanding more rapidly than your own business or whether a challenger is beginning to take a greater share of the available opportunity.

Chris compared it to receiving a pay rise that is lower than inflation. Your salary has increased, but your position has weakened in real terms. The same principle can apply to Amazon growth.

The competitor behind you may be more important than the one ahead

This leads to another useful implication for established Amazon Vendors.

Most businesses know who the category leaders are and tend to pay attention to the brands immediately above them. The less obvious risk can come from the businesses sitting further down the market but growing considerably faster.

A challenger brand may be much smaller today, but if it is consistently gaining visibility, accumulating reviews, investing in advertising and growing at a faster rate, the gap can close surprisingly quickly.

That means competitive analysis should not simply be a snapshot of who is biggest now. It should also look at the direction of travel.

For Vendor teams, this is where benchmarking becomes much more valuable. The question is not only “Who are our biggest competitors?” but “Who is changing fastest, and what might that mean six or twelve months from now?”

“Amazon is doing fine” may not be the reassurance it sounds like

Another interesting idea in Chris and Andy’s conversation is that the quiet Amazon accounts can sometimes be the ones worth examining more closely.

When Amazon is creating obvious problems, it tends to get attention. Chargebacks increase, availability drops, profitability shifts or sales fall, and suddenly there are meetings, projects and people focused on fixing the issue.

A business that is “doing fine” can receive much less scrutiny.

Orders continue to arrive, revenue remains respectable and the account keeps running, so Amazon gradually becomes something that is managed rather than something that is actively developed.

That creates a different kind of risk because there may be no single problem large enough to demand attention. Instead, opportunities are simply missed over time.

A useful question for leadership teams is therefore not only whether Amazon is performing adequately, but whether the amount of strategic attention it receives reflects its actual importance to the business.

Andy describes businesses where Amazon represents around 25% to 35% of turnover. At that level, it is difficult to argue that Amazon is simply another account that somebody needs to keep on top of. It is a significant commercial channel, and the way it is managed should reflect that.

Amazon growth affects far more than the Amazon team

This is also why Amazon strategy cannot sit entirely inside Vendor Central.

If the opportunity is significant, increasing Amazon sales affects inventory planning, supply chain decisions, forecasting, advertising investment, profitability and the way products are launched and supported across the wider organisation.

The more strategically mature businesses Andy describes tend to have much clearer ownership around Amazon, including dedicated internal resources and a better understanding of the channel’s profit and loss position.

That does not mean every Vendor needs a large specialist team. It does mean that resources, reporting and ownership should be proportionate to the size of the opportunity.

Three questions to add to your next Amazon review

☐ Are we growing faster or slower than the category around us?

☐ Which competitors are gaining ground most quickly?

☐ Does the attention Amazon receives internally reflect both its current contribution and its future potential?

These questions are deliberately broader than a standard sales review because they help move the conversation away from whether Amazon is simply “up” or “down” and towards whether the business is making the most of the market it operates in.

Amazon’s influence does not stop at the checkout

There is one final point that makes this conversation particularly relevant.

Amazon is not only a place where transactions happen. Customers use it to research products, compare prices, read reviews and validate buying decisions, even when the final purchase happens elsewhere.

That means a brand’s Amazon presence can influence customers beyond the sales that appear directly in Vendor Central.

For established Vendors, that makes the strategic question considerably wider than “Did Amazon grow this year?”

A better question is…

Are we using Amazon as effectively as the opportunity in front of us demands?

Because growth is useful, but growth without context can create a false sense of comfort. And sometimes the businesses that appear to be doing perfectly well are the ones that need the most interesting questions asked.