Brand-direct partnerships get talked about like something you earn after years of grinding, a reward for reaching some threshold of sales volume or credibility. So sellers put it off. They keep buying from distributors, operating on thin margins, and waiting until they feel “ready.” 

There’s a version of selling on Amazon that looks like a business, but it isn’t. You have a few products. They’re listed. Orders come in. Money moves. From the outside, it looks like everything’s working. But if those products disappeared tomorrow, what would you have left?

We talk to sellers every week who are doing the work. Their listings are optimized. PPC is running. They're tracking competitors and monitoring for unauthorized sellers. The tactics are there. The effort is there. But their results have plateaued.