Rankings, Reviews, Keywords: E-Commerce Advice for F&B

Jeff Klineman

Rankings, reviews, keywords. Even before Friday’s announcement of Amazon’s massive, $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods Markets, the online behemoth was already causing change in the incubation and sale of entrepreneurial brands.

A panel early on during last week’s BevNET Live in Manhattan discussed e-marketing and a lot of the time was spent on the Amazon effect: In terms of setting up direct-to-consumer marketplaces, creating “full basket” solutions with Amazon Fresh, and simply providing a place for customers to search by keywords for specific products, the e-commerce titan has begun to exert an outsized influence in the ways consumers shop.

Brands on Amazon at times are “transcending the distribution channel” in the way they are sold directly to consumers via those keywords, noted Profitero’s Keith Anderson, while some brands are simply starting businesses based on those top-searched keywords.

We can’t tell you that the following video is going to supply entrepreneurs with all of the answers to questions about how things will shake out for them with Amazon folding Whole Foods into its family. But our panelists did discuss a lot of the ways companies should be thinking about a strategy that incorporates Amazon and other e-commerce plays as they seek to grow — and that’s a discussion that has become doubly relevant in light of this most recent development.

So how should you plan for e-commerce? What are the ways you can “heavy up” for Amazon? Start thinking about it by watching the following panel, called “E-Commerce for Beverage Entrepreneurs: What Really Matters.”