An Amazon channel strategy for a Maine manufacturer

Malone Auto Racks makes kayak, bike and cargo racks and trailers. Its products sell on Amazon through resellers, which keeps the business capital-light, but resellers keep roughly half of every retail dollar and Malone has little control over its brand or its shopper data.

Leadership wanted to know whether the reseller model was costing them, and what to do about it without hiring an Amazon team.

We audited all 132 of Malone's Amazon listings live and researched how comparable outdoor brands structure their marketplace strategy.

One finding reframed the whole plan: Malone's main competition on Amazon was not the big-name rack brands, but factory-direct imports. We rebuilt the strategy around that.

We built a pro forma with conservative, base and upside scenarios that leadership can flex themselves, and earlier helped with conversion, AEO and Shopify migration planning for Malone's own site.

Malone has a 60 to 90 day plan, led by its own staff on a lean outside budget, that activates brand-protection tools it already owned, fixes its most important product pages and puts its key reseller relationship in writing.

The pro forma projects that first phase paying back its outside spend in under three months even in the conservative case, and returning roughly 5x to 20x that spend in year one across scenarios.

Larger moves, like a Malone-run storefront, are deliberately deferred until the first 90 days produce results.