An Amazon spokesperson said multiple types of sellers use its platform.
“Sellers of all sizes from global brands to small and emerging businesses choose Amazon because they gain access to high-impact tools and programs that help simplify their operations and drive their business growth,” the spokesperson said.
In many cases, big CPG brands are struggling to keep up despite having better average consumer ratings and more discounts. In only one category of the 18 analyzed—cat food and treats—did major CPG brands outnumber third-party seller brands on the first page of search results for top searches.
“It’s structural advantage rather than brand heritage,” Zoghby said. “They know how to play the game.”
What’s working for these third-party sellers is that they’re set up to constantly update product detail pages and tweak retail media spend to follow search trends. By contrast, big CPG companies handle thousands of SKUs for each retailer and millions of placements on digital shelves, meaning that companies can’t update product pages more than every few months.
According to a survey of CPG executives conducted for a separate report that Agentic Systems for Commerce published in September, 80% of organizations are failing to keep up with modern commerce complexity and almost 70% spend more time reconciling data than acting on it.
As large language models and generative AI-powered chatbots take a bigger role in consumer discovery, these product pages will become even more critical. If product pages are out of date, that’s the information that will end up in the chatbots, Zoghby said, arguing that major CPGs will need to find a way to compete using agentic systems of their own.
