Amazon Merchant vs. SEO

What happens to your SEO when Amazon gets involved?

[vicvac]

I have a client who I did an SEO project for, we are in the 4th month, client had 1 29th position, now has 15 positions in the top 20 and 5 in the top ten. Sales are up 900% and growing really fast.

Amazon contacted the client and offered to sell his widgets through their merchant program and client has asked me to give him a database dump so he can get rich.

This can't be good my SEO program in place. We have a #1 position for one of the widgets and we sell a lot of them because of it. G goes right to our page in the shopping cart. With a giant like Amazon, we will have to lose positions to them, right? Could there be other effects from having the database over at Amazon as well?

My client resells stuff he buys from big, name brand companies. If they actually start selling a lot, is Amazon going to continue to buy and drop ship from a very little reseller?

Something smells fishy in the bookstore!

[feiman]

I can't speak to the effects on your SEP, but I've worked with a few different companies that work with Amazon with this program. Amazon is moving more and more towards this format, with most of their new channels being 100% merchant products. The downside from SEP is that Amazon's listings of your client's products will pop up high due to the fact that they're on Amazon and you'll lose that traffic to Amazon, but if he's looking at it from the "sales are sales" perspective, it shouldn't matter.

Generally speaking, from an e-commerce perspective, the Amazon Merchant program is a really nice deal and very much worth doing. Its been going on for almost 2 years now and the fact that Amazon is very much moving from the warehouse format to the mall format means that you should look at this more as an affiliate type of relationship than anything else.

[phantombookman]

They regularly contact people and try to get them to sign up, myself included, with costs and %ages they make a lot of money for doing next to nothing.

That said it does not mean it is not beneficial to some, I know people who do very well with it