Do Less Better: The Amazon Strategy Most Brands Avoid

Most Amazon brands do not need more traffic. They need fewer distractions.

In this episode of Selling on Giants, Mr. Will breaks down why many brands stall on Amazon not because they lack SKUs, campaigns, keywords, tools, or traffic, but because the account has become too bloated to scale efficiently.

The core idea is simple: everything you think you “have to do” on Amazon may actually be optional unless it helps the customer click, convert, buy, review, and keep the flywheel moving.

Using Elon Musk’s “algorithm” framework, this episode looks at a better way to approach Amazon catalog optimization:

• Question every requirement
• Delete anything you can
• Simplify what remains
• Accelerate
• Automate last

Most Amazon accounts get this order wrong. Brands jump straight to speed, tools, automation, and campaign expansion before asking whether the catalog, listings, variations, or ad structure deserve to exist in the first place.

Mr. Will shares a real operator example from a dog leash and harness brand doing around one million dollars on Amazon. On the surface, the business looked healthy. Revenue was steady, the catalog was full, and the team was constantly launching new colors, styles, and ideas. But underneath, the account was carrying hundreds of variations, aged inventory, storage fees, wasted ad spend, underfunded winners, and cash tied up in products that were not moving.

The answer was not more traffic.

The answer was focus.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why more SKUs often create more drag, not more growth
• How aged inventory quietly eats margin
• Why top-line revenue can hide catalog and inventory problems
• How too many variations can confuse customers and weaken conversion
• Why ad spend should be earned by performance, not spread evenly across the catalog
• How pausing underperforming spend can improve Tacos and growth
• Why automation only works after the account is clean
• How to separate real growth opportunities from catalog noise
• Why Amazon catalog optimization often starts with deleting
• The one question every seller should ask before adding anything new

The leash brand’s breakthrough came when the account was simplified around the products that were actually driving demand. The catalog was cut down, listings became cleaner, ad spend was concentrated around proven performers, and budget moved toward top converting SKUs, high-intent keywords, and proven placements.

That is the bigger lesson: Amazon growth does not always come from doing more. Many times, it comes from doing less, better.

At BellaVix, we help brands turn marketplace complexity into clear operating plans. That means cleaning up catalogs, rationalizing SKUs, tightening listings, restructuring campaigns, focusing budget on what has earned it, and building feedback loops that help teams make better decisions with less noise.

BellaVix has helped brands sell over five hundred million dollars on Amazon and is a Verified Ad Partner, but the real work is helping brands stop scaling complexity and start scaling what already works.

The question worth asking:
If you cut your catalog in half tomorrow, would your business suffer, or would it finally focus?

Subscribe to Selling on Giants for weekly operator-level breakdowns on Amazon, Walmart, retail media, marketplace strategy, AI commerce, eCommerce growth, and what actually changes for brands responsible for profitability.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Selling on Giants podcast. I'm your host, Mr. Will, and today we're talking about one of the most uncomfortable truths in Amazon growth, which is that most brands do not need more traffic, more campaigns, more SKUs, more tools, or more complexity. A lot of brands are not stuck because they are missing the next tactic. They are stuck because the account has too many distractions competing for the same dollars, the same inventory, the same customer attention, and the same internal decision-making bandwidth. That is where Amazon catalog optimization gets misunderstood because most people hear catalog optimization and think it means cleaning up titles, improving bullets, updating images, fixing variation structure, or making the content look more professional. And while all of that can matter, the deeper work is asking whether the catalog should even be that large, that messy, that expensive, or that hard for the customer to understand in the first place. Most brands treat Amazon like it is rigid, like there is a correct way to run ads, a correct way to structure listings, a correct way to organize campaigns, and some master checklist you have to follow if you want to win. There is not. Amazon does not reward the brand with the longest process or the most complete internal checklist. Amazon rewards the brand that gets the customer to click, convert, buy again, review, and keep the flywheel moving. Everything else is optional. That is a hard concept for operators because optional does not mean unimportant. It means you need to earn the right to keep it. Every SKU, every variation, every color, every campaign, every keyword, every creative angle, and every process should have to justify its place in the business because if it does not create value, it creates drag. There is a framework from Elon Musk that I like for this, and he calls it the algorithm. But it is not software, code, or math. It is a way of thinking. You question every requirement, delete anything you can, simplify what remains, accelerate the process, and only then do you automate. The order matters because most Amazon accounts skip the first three steps and jump straight into speed and automation, which is how bloated accounts become even more bloated, just faster. That is the mistake. Brands automate noise, scale complexity, and then wonder why the account feels heavy. They build more campaigns before asking whether the SKUs deserve support, add more variations before asking whether the customer needs them, launch more colors before asking whether the existing colors are turning, and add more tools before asking whether the team is even making clean decisions with the data it already has. Amazon does not care about any of that effort. It cares about outcomes. Click-through rate, conversion rate, sales velocity, profitability, inventory health, and customer response are what matter. And yet most brands build around what they think they have to do instead of what the market has already proven is worth doing. We saw this clearly with a dog leash and harness brand that was doing around $1 million on Amazon. And on the surface, the business looked like it was working. Revenue was steady, the catalog looked full, the account had activity, and there was always another new color, new style, new variation, or new idea being discussed, which made the business feel like it was moving forward. Under the hood, it was breaking. The catalog had hundreds of variations, colors that had not sold meaningfully in 6 to 12 months, styles competing against each other, listings that were hard to understand, and inventory that made the business look bigger than it actually was. Their strategy was basically expand, expand, expand, because more products felt like growth, more options felt like opportunity, and more activity felt like control. But Amazon was not showing the full cost clearly enough. A meaningful portion of inventory was aged, storage and long-term fees were quietly eating margin, too much ad spend was going toward SKUs that never converted well, the top sellers were underfunded, and cash was locked inside products that were not moving. The top line looked fine, but the business underneath it was carrying too much weight. That is one of the traps of Amazon. Revenue can hide operational weakness for a long time, especially when the catalog is big enough to make the account look active. But if your winners are paying for your losers, if your ad budget is spread across products that do not deserve it, and if inventory is aging while the team keeps talking about expansion, you are not scaling. You are subsidizing complexity. So we started where Musk's framework starts. We questioned the requirements. Why do we have this many SKUs? Why are we advertising all of them? Why do these colors still exist? Why are these variations grouped this way? Why are we funding products that have already shown us they do not convert? And once we asked those questions honestly, a lot of the answers were not strategic. They were just momentum. Momentum is dangerous because it feels like a plan, but often it is just the residue of decisions nobody wants to revisit. A color got launched, so it stayed. A campaign was created, so it kept spending. A variation was added, so it remained part of the customer experience. SQU had potential, so the team kept treating it like the future instead of admitting the market had already voted. The next move was delete, and that is where most brands stall because deleting feels like giving up. Even when the data is telling you that the product has already given up on you. We cut the catalog down to around 20 core SKUs, not the ones people liked internally, not the ones with theoretical potential, and not the ones someone believed could work with just a little more support, but the ones actually driving demand. That changed everything because once the dead weight was removed, the remaining catalog became easier to understand, easier to advertise, easier to manage, and easier for customers to shop. The listings made more sense, the variations were cleaner, the buying path had less friction, and the team was no longer trying to make every product feel equally important when the market had already told us they were not. This is the part sellers overlook. Sometimes conversion improves not because you add a new creative strategy, not because you find a new hack, and not because you unlock some hidden Amazon tactic, but because you remove the things confusing the customer and draining the account. Clarity is a growth lever, and it is one of the most underused levers in marketplace management. Once the catalog was simplified, then we could accelerate. Not trimmed it, not lightly reduced it, but paused spend that was going toward products and campaigns that had not earned the right to keep receiving budget. No more coverage campaigns for the sake of coverage, no more funding SKUs that needed to find their way, and no more pretending every product deserved equal attention. Then we leaned into what I would call a honeypot approach, where budget gets concentrated around the products, keywords, and placements already showing the strongest signals. Top converting SKUs got more attention, high-intent keywords got cleaner support, proven placements got budget, and everything else either fed into that system or stopped distracting from it. That is not the same as being conservative. It is focused aggression. The difference is that unfocused brands spread spend evenly because it feels fair, while operators concentrate spend where the market has already shown a response. Amazon does not reward fairness across your catalog, it rewards performance. Within a few months, the account became healthier because the traffic pool did not need to get dramatically bigger, the allocation needed to get smarter. Tacos improved, ad efficiency improved, revenue grew despite lower spend, inventory started turning faster, and storage pressure eased because the account was no longer trying to support every idea that had ever made it into the catalog. That is the bigger lesson. Same market, same customer base, same general demand environment, but a cleaner operating system. The business did not need more noise. It needed fewer distractions and better allocation. Only after that did automation make sense because automation is powerful when it is scaling something clean and dangerous when it is scaling something messy. Once the account was simplified, bid rules could amplify winners, budgets could move where they should, and systems could reinforce what was already working. Automation did not fix the account, it exposed what was worth scaling. This is where a lot of brands get the order wrong. They want tools to solve a strategy problem, dashboards to solve a decision problem, automation to solve a discipline problem, and more campaigns to solve a catalog problem. That is backwards. Tools do not create clarity. They multiply whatever is already inside the account. If the account is clean, tools help. If the account is messy, tools spread the mess faster. The pattern is easy to spot once you have seen it enough times. A brand says they need more SKUs, more campaigns, more keywords, more influencers, more DSP, more tools, more reporting, and more expansion when what they actually need is fewer things competing for attention. Every added option has a cost, and the cost is not just the product itself. It is inventory, storage, ad spend, operational complexity, reporting complexity, customer confusion, and management time. Most of those costs stay hidden until margin disappears. That is why more feels dangerous to me when it is not tied to a clear reason. More products can feel like growth. More campaigns can feel like control. More keywords can feel like coverage. More tools can feel like maturity. But a lot of the time, more is just noise. And noise kills clarity. This is where Bellovics creates a lot of value for brands because our job is not to make Amazon look busier. Our job is to help brands build marketplace systems that actually perform. That means cleaning up catalogs, tightening listings, rationalizing SKUs, restructuring campaigns, focusing budget on what has earned it, and building feedback loops that help the team make better decisions with less noise. Bellivix has helped brands sell over $500 million on Amazon, and we are a verified ad partner. But the real value is not just campaign management or catalog cleanup. It is hands-on strategy and execution that turns marketplace complexity into a clear operating plan because growth rarely comes from doing everything. It usually comes from doing the right things consistently and cutting the rest. If your brand needs that kind of support, visit Bellovix.com. The shift I want sellers to take from this is simple. Stop starting with what should we add? Start with what are we doing right now that we do not actually need to be doing? That question forces discipline because it makes the current operation defend itself before the team adds another layer on top of it. Do we need every SKU? Do we need every variation? Do we need every campaign? Do we need to keep funding that product? Do we need to keep that listing structure? Do we need to keep chasing a color, size, or style the market has ignored for a year? Do we need another tool or do we need a clearer decision-making process? Those questions are not always fun, but they are honest. The brands that win on Amazon are not always the brands doing the most. They are the brands that understand what actually moves the account forward and have the discipline to stop feeding everything else. That is a harder way to operate because it forces you to admit that some of your ideas are not worth keeping, but it is also the way you build a cleaner, more profitable, more scalable business. Amazon catalog optimization is not just making things look better. It is making the account easier for the customer to understand, easier for the algorithm to reward, easier for the team to manage, and easier for the business to scale. Sometimes that means adding. A lot of the time it means deleting. So here is the question worth asking. If you cut your catalog in half tomorrow, would your business actually suffer or would it finally focus? That's it for this episode of the Selling on Giants podcast. If this one made you think differently about catalog complexity, ad spend, or how much your account is carrying that it does not need, share it with another seller or operator who is trying to grow by doing more. And if you are getting value from the show, I would be grateful for a quick review because it helps us reach more brands trying to build smarter, cleaner marketplace businesses. I'm Mr. Will, host of the Selling on Giants podcast. Thanks for listening and keep doing less, better.