Why Amazon Is the Fastest Way to Build Trust for a New Brand

The Secret Weapon for Launching Anything New

The secret weapon to launching a new product or a new brand is Amazon. Recently I had the pleasure of meeting with top executives at Amazon, which as you know is the greatest e-commerce platform on the planet. I don't know if you know this, but 50% of every dollar spent on the internet in the USA today is spent through Amazon.

I'm in the middle of launching brands myself. Several of them. The most important one right now is the brand I'm launching with my good friend and client Cesar Millan, the original host of the Dog Whisperer TV series. You probably know him because everybody does. We're launching a brand new pet supplement brand called Better Dog Supplements. I've been building it for two years. Very high quality line, booming market.

Here's the thing. Cesar has been in the industry for decades. Twenty years on television, National Geographic, you name it. What he hasn't done before is launch a pet supplement brand. And even with a giant like Cesar, the only global personal brand on the subject of pets, you can't just launch it by itself and expect it to fly.

A Great Website Is Not Trust

Our website looks amazing. It's a great brand, a great website, very powerful. But here's what you don't have just yet: you don't have trust, you don't have credibility, you don't have the e-commerce positioning.

Amazon invited me to a private event at a Michelin star restaurant in Miami, and I got to sit down with some of the smartest people in the Amazon game. Their message was simple. When you're going to market with a brand that nobody knows yet, it doesn't matter what celebrity you have, it doesn't matter how great your product is, there's nothing like leveraging the power and the name of Amazon together with a major brand. And I would say that was quite on point.

Because here's the thing: people are conditioned to believe in Amazon as a legit, authentic commerce platform. If you are on Amazon, you are automatically legit. Your audience believes you are real. People start buying, they start leaving reviews, and your brand starts going out into the world fast. We just launched, and the reviews are already coming in.

What Amazon Has That You Don't

Let me put this on the whiteboard for you. Amazon has trust. You, as a new brand, have no trust. It doesn't matter how famous you are, how much following you have, or how established your personal brand is. You don't have trust yet as a commerce brand. Amazon does, and Amazon will handle that problem for you.

Amazon has buyers. You have no buyers. This year alone Amazon is going to have somewhere around 125 million Prime members in the USA alone, and growing across the planet. You cannot get 125 million people to have access to discovering your products through a simple search result anywhere else. It's very unique.

Amazon has a brand. You have an unknown brand. So when you launch on Amazon, you put that awesome logo with a smile next to your brand and you immediately have credibility. You have trust. You have a legit source of power backing you up across the board.

Critical Mass: When the Algorithm Starts Feeding You

There's something I've learned over the years in the game of business called critical mass. It gets to a point where the sales just keep going, keep expanding, and you can almost go on autopilot because the brand has taken off. You push and push and push, one sale, two sales, five sales, and then at some point that thing goes boom and you go from five to ten to fifty to a hundred to a thousand sales. It's a beautiful feeling.

Amazon can give you critical mass growth. It doesn't happen overnight, but once the algorithm triggers, everything changes. Here's a real example. Cesar Millan is a big keyword on Amazon because he has 12 books, dog collars, other products, decades in the industry. Because we've been putting our product out there and generating sales, Amazon now starts positioning us on major search results next to all his books and everything else he has going on. My supplements are showing up on search results related to Cesar Millan. I became part of the algorithm.

The more sales you produce, and the more you do a grassroots movement, spreading the word on social media, getting friends and family to purchase on Amazon, the more the algorithm will feed you and flow that energy back to you.

The Game Plan: 60 Days Straight to Amazon

Here's the high-level game plan to get your new product off the ground. Create your direct-to-consumer website, like betterdogsupplements.com, or like NaturalSlim, the brand I've been growing with my family for 20 years. But at the same time, set up your Amazon Seller Central account and start creating your listings, images, descriptions, and offers. And align the two. Your website and your Amazon store should share the same branding elements, otherwise you'll have a disconnected brand.

Use Amazon Attribution. It's a program inside Seller Central where you create special links to share on Facebook, Instagram, email, text messages. When somebody purchases through that link, you get 10% back from their purchases. But above all, you can track clicks, purchases, and conversion so you can actually measure your campaigns.

Then create volume of ads. In the social media game in 2026, creative is king, and creatives in quantity are going to be the dominant force. Some people are producing hundreds of different creatives a week, thousands a month. And by the way, the era of AI that we're going through right now is the greatest opportunity to increase that volume dramatically. Images, videos, production at scale. You used to need a team of dozens of people. Now a few smart people who know how to leverage AI can do it.

So take the first 60 days and go heavy: Meta, TikTok, and Google ads sending traffic straight to Amazon, with as much budget as you can. Give Amazon the traffic it needs so it triggers its algorithm and gives you ranking and visibility. Sixty days later, once you have some sales, traction, and branding in place, redirect your campaigns back to your own e-commerce site, whether that's Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce. I'm hoping it's Shopify, because that's the platform we enjoy more than anything.

Be Willing to Be in the Red

Don't try to be profitable in the first 60 days. It is a very rare thing to have a brand go from zero to profitability in 60 or 90 days. There's a reason most people are not building brands: it takes a lot to build one.

You know how there's in the red and in the black? In the black means profitable, in the red means negative. You have to be willing to be in the red for 60, 90 days, sometimes 180 days, sometimes even more, until you get to critical mass growth.

And it is worth every single effort and every single sacrifice. Because once you get a brand off the ground and it starts making money, you start being able to bring in more staff, help more families, and help more people. That's the whole point.