Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Ethan McAfee, CEO and the Founder of Amify:
Q: What is your story?
A: I started the company in 2010 after a career on Wall Street because I saw the potential of ecommerce and knew that Amazon was the place to be. I started off selling hard to find Pickleball equipment on Amazon, but once I saw the challenges that sellers faced, I knew that helping other companies understand and leverage Amazon was the best long term strategy. So, we pivoted to what Amify is today – helping brands address all of the challenges that I faced as a seller.
Today, Amify delivers turnkey, award-winning services to help brands launch, manage and continually optimize their Amazon channel strategy. As the first Amazon-as-a-Service provider, we serve as an outsourced Amazon team, which helps companies own their brand on the world’s largest ecommerce platform by leveraging cross channel data to increase sales and improve customer experience.
Our team offers vast expertise to brands from content and advertising to data analytics and business operations. From our high-performing, beautiful storefronts, to our optimized forecasting and logistics, we’re an embedded extension of our client’s team, whose mission is to make it painless for clients to win on Amazon.
Recommended: Mio Connects With The People You Work With On Slack, Microsoft Teams, And Cisco Webex
Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: Hitting $100M in annual run rate for gross merchandise value is a huge milestone for Amify. When I started the company 10 years ago, I couldn’t even conceive of us being able to sell $100 million worth of products annually for our clients on the Amazon platform. Now, we are looking to double that again by year’s end. It shows you how much ecommerce is growing, and how much it will continue to grow.
We hit this number for two reasons. First, we grew our client base substantially, and, second, we also helped all of our clients increase sales dramatically. On average, we grew sales for our clients on Amazon by 150% compared to the industry average of 16-25%. This is fairly unprecedented in the space, and we are confident this trend will continue. Now that consumers have made this major leap into ecommerce as a primary way to shop, there are no signs of a drop off as pandemic restrictions ease.
We are excited about what this milestone says about Amify and its future.
Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: We are the first company to manage Amazon for our clients end-to-end – something we call Amazon-as-a-Service. Most companies in the space specialize in advertising and branding – and that’s great- we do this too. It’s important for brands to do those basics correctly and our content and advertising offerings has won multiple awards. But it takes much more than that to successfully run an ecommerce channel like Amazon. Amify serves as an extension of our client’s internal team, managing our client’s supply chain, returns, customer service, storefront creation and more. We know how Amazon works and how it is evolving, so our clients can completely outsource this channel to us and know that we will deliver results.
Brands have multiple channels to manage, and it’s hard to be specialists in each of them. They need partners like Amify that are experts in particular channels, especially such a key one as Amazon. We help them by establishing and managing their Amazon presence in a way that aligns with their broader go-to-market strategy – and our results clearly demonstrate the success of this model.
Recommended: Bringing The New-Tech Vision To Dubai – TekRevol Launches In Dubai To Change The Technology Landscape
Q: What can we expect from your company in the next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: We expect to continue on our sales trajectory and expect to hit a run rate of $200M in GMV by the end of 2021. This will require us to scale our team accordingly, especially on the sales and operations sides. I expect the Amify team to top 100 by year’s end. We also expect to expand our client base both through direct sales and through partner relationships, so you can expect many new logos on our site. On the services and product side, we know the aggregated sales data we have is a valuable asset that we can use to help provide greater insights to our clients to drive their ecommerce strategy.
Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: We have a strong culture at Amify that rewards success and strong teamwork. We offer a great combination of salary, benefits, bonuses, stock options, and a fun work environment. And, we have a phenomenal team with a wide range of expertise that you don’t normally see in this space. We have experts in brand development and marketing, sales, and content, along with operations, supply chain, and finance.
Last Updated on July 3, 2021
