What Amazon Strips Out Of A Certified Product (with Greg Raece from Online Metals) | Ep. 49

Raw materials break most e-commerce assumptions. One alloy comes in dozens of shapes, lengths, and certification states, and a 20-foot bar weighing thousands of pounds doesn't drop neatly into a 3PL warehouse. Kyler Nixon sits down with Greg Raece of Online Metals to talk through what happens when a distributor decides the answer isn't more inventory.

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Greg describes the problem as an infinite warehouse: there is always another material a customer wants that requires additional processing before it can ship. Rather than stock it all, Online Metals opened its own website to third-party sellers, with their pricing, their descriptions, and their fulfillment, intertwined into one catalog and one checkout.

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The conversation covers how they spotted latent demand, why they rejected the direct drop-ship model, what selling on Amazon costs a certified product, and how they market a marketplace when 100-plus sellers all want the same email slot.

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👤 Guest Bio

Greg Raece is President of Online Metals, the Seattle-based e-commerce supplier of cut-to-size metals and plastics, founded in 1998 and now part of thyssenkrupp Materials NA. He was appointed president in November 2016 and led the launch of the company's third-party marketplace, which has since grown past 100 curated sellers and doubled the size of the catalog. His background before Online Metals includes Microsoft, Starbucks, and startups.

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📌 What We Cover

Why a raw materials catalog behaves like an infinite warehouse, and why six warehouses still can't cover itHow Online Metals read latent demand from site searches, sales conversations, and customer service callsThe direct model they rejected: when a supplier's price moves after you've already promised it on the websiteLetting sellers control price, description, and fulfillment so the seller owns their own profitabilityWhat Amazon strips out: no heat lot, no alloy history, no mill test report, and a B2B order compressed into a B2C format with lower AOVOne cart, one checkout, shipping from different locations, with marketplace product intertwined into the main catalog rather than behind a loginSellers using the marketplace as a live pilot before Online Metals decides to stock an item itselfThe product data gate every seller clears before graduating into loyalty, email, and promotions, plus why selling coal to blacksmiths made the newsletter

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

OnlineMetals.comAmazon, referenced as both a channel Online Metals sells on and the model they deliberately built againstGreg Raece on LinkedInKyler Nixon on LinkedIn