Our growth journey on Amazon started with a pair of shoes.

Our adventure with e-commerce started back in 2007, when our two founders founded the company E-shoes, which, as the name suggests, sold shoes online. True to the name, E-shoes was an online shoe shop which carried large Scandinavian and international brands. The growth strategy for the company was to conquer Denmark first before expanding to Scandinavia and eventually the rest of Northern Europe. After 5 years, E-shoes was ready to take on Germany. The plan was clear: get a German website, German customer service employees and German adwords. Yet, the strategy missed the mark. E-shoes got a lot of traffic but the competition was equally fierce.

New strategy

The dream of Germany had not been dropped completely but the strategy had to be revised – Amazon was gonna be the new export avenue. 35.000 E-shoes products were launched on Amazon.de, sold out of a single warehouse in Denmark through FBM – Fullfilment by Merchant. Shortly after, Amazon suspended our account for the first time. We hadn’t been able to reply to all our customer inquiries within 24 hours as Amazon requires. Not two months later, we got suspended again. This time, one of the shipping companies had lost a bulk of products and customers were not receiving their orders on time.

An analogue solution to a digital problem

We actually got close to hitting 3 shutdowns in the first 6 months. It was Black Friday, and our inventory system had lost connection with Amazon’s network. This meant that Amazon confirmed more orders than we could deliver. We were now left with a massive problem as Amazon would likely suspend our account once again if we could not deliver the orders. Søren called up all his suppliers to ask if Eshoes could buy more inventory. He managed to get the majority of the products he needed, but 12 orders were still missing. As a last-minute resort, Søren hopped in the family Volvo, and after visiting all the local shoe retailers, he was able to buy products for all the remaining customers. In the end, everyone got their orders, Amazon was happy and we avoided another shutdown.

Reorganization from FBM to FBA

It was hardly sustainable to keep risking suspension at every turn – something had to change. We made large revisions to our business model, alongside necessary changes in the company structure and shipping services provider. We developed a new model for integration with Amazon which resulted in sales blossoming on Amazon in Germany.

Many experiences wiser, and a thorough knowledge of the brands performing well on Amazon, propelled us to change the distribution model to Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) for a few select products. This meant that Amazon would deliver these products to customers and handle customer support. It also meant that Eshoes got approved for Amazon Prime, Amazon’s customer club. Subsequently, Eshoes expanded from Amazon.de to England, Italy, Spain, France and Poland. Amazon became the company’s largest source of revenue with better margins and less money spent on ads.

Amazon advisory became our primary business in 2018. Based on our own experiences we are helping clients become successful on Amazon every day.

We have a team of highly specialized Amazon enthusiasts that love to go into detail and understand the technology, data and logic behind the e-commerce giant. We have made thousands of sales on Amazon, talked to thousands of customers, listed thousands of new products and been to all corners of the platform.