How Amazon Experts built an agency from seller experience
Stanislav Yordanov is co-founder of Amazon Experts, an agency that helps brands sell and grow on Amazon through listings, creative, advertising and authorised distribution. The conversation traces the move from selling Bulgarian-sourced products to serving other brands, and explains how running its own seller accounts informs the agency’s work.
Build a service around work you already do in your own business, then keep applying and refining that work as customer expectations change. For Amazon Experts, active selling and fluency with Amazon’s data are central to serving brands in a more competitive market.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
It started as a small plan to sell on Amazon. We began with products we could source in Bulgaria, mostly cosmetics, and sold them alongside other sellers on the Buy Box. Then we started approaching some of those manufacturers and asking to become the exclusive seller for their brands. Back then some of those brands sold around 50 units a month; today they sell 100 times more. What makes us different is that we are still active Amazon sellers ourselves, with 50+ brands in our own seller accounts. We are not consultants who made it when Amazon was easier and now only give advice.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Once we saw we were good at what we do (selling, optimising listings, advertising and everything around it), we decided to offer it to other brands too. Two years later we have quite a few happy clients and we keep growing. Today new clients find us mainly through LinkedIn and our website, where we give brands free tools and a free listing audit.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision that changed everything was to offer what we do for our own brands as a service for other companies. As for mistakes, there isn’t just one. Since 2018 we have made mistakes in every area of Amazon you can think of, and every one of them taught us something. That is exactly what made us good at what we do today.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Amazon has become far more competitive and far more data-driven. Brands now expect an agency to speak Amazon’s own data language: Search Query Performance, Brand Analytics, advertising data. We adapted by becoming service providers as well as sellers, refining what we do even further, and by building free tools for brands on our site. We keep getting better at it because we run the same playbook on our own accounts every day.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Don’t copy what most people do. First, dig deeper into how you can build a business in a non-standard way. Ignore the usual route of finding a similar product and trying to break through against all the existing competition.
Thank you to Stanislav Yordanov and the team at Amazon Experts for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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