Amazon once hosted a long list of Chinese 3C “big sellers.” When account bans hit, many names vanished. Anker Innovations stayed.

Outsiders like to call survival luck or “better at gaming reviews.” Founder Yang Meng (Steven Yang) is colder. In a Baijing write-up of his Verge conversation he said Amazon was still more than half of the business, but the company was migrating omnichannel; you cannot hang yourself on one tree; fighting fakes on Amazon is an endless cat-and-mouse game.

Tearing off the “Amazon big seller” label is not a vow to sell less on Amazon.

It is admitting: a platform can be the largest channel without remaining the company itself.

The independent site—and shelves at Costco, Walmart, Best Buy—exist to pry customer relationships off the marketplace page. Site growth once outran its small share of revenue; Anker and outsiders cast it as a “second growth pole”: the percentage can stay modest; strategically it cannot wait.

What he owned first was a whole Amazon tree

Around 2011, ex-Google engineer Yang started up. The public origin story: swapping a laptop battery in the U.S. and seeing a gap—OEM pricey, no-name junk. Anker entered Amazon on charging accessories, parking quality and price in the middle.

An early Verge profile noted most sales on Amazon Marketplace; strong reviews, fair prices, and search rank could turn one SKU into a line. Marketplace Pulse later called Anker among the most successful Amazon-native brands—Amazon was not a channel; it was nearly the channel. Circa 2016 Amazon was about 80% of revenue; by 2021 still over half, down to roughly 54%.

About 3% of headcount sat in the Amazon org—Yang told The Verge that at ~3,000 people, about a hundred mainly thought about Amazon. For a “big seller,” normal: platform rules are the climate; reviews are the product manager.

Yang has said Amazon reviews are the single most important input to new-product development. When the trunk is that thick, leaving the shade feels unnatural.

The real bind: the customer is not in your hands

The bind is not “Amazon sales are too weak.”

It is that the better you sell, the more assets pile up in someone else’s house.

Type “Anker” in search and the algorithm may still push cheaper “competitors” into prime slots—Yang complained about neighbors that drag the category down. Fakes and copycats are cat-and-mouse; malicious one-star piles can appear overnight. New products hurt more: old ASINs carry thousands of reviews; new ones climb from zero. Verge recorded his dilemma—launching new products on Amazon had gotten harder.

Ban waves turned abstract risk into a crime scene: peer 3C giants from the same era fell; Anker was among the few star names still standing. Yang declined to pile on about bans, stressing only that seller rules must be read carefully. The structural lesson runs deeper:

Part of a big seller’s moat is really the platform’s moat. Compliance, R&D, GaN bets—you can still sit passive under rules and traffic allocation.

The wrong fix: more Amazon headcount, more ads, more private traffic poured back into Amazon. Early Anker off-Amazon promotion often sent people into the Amazon store—users ended in platform accounts. The trunk grew thicker; roots stayed in someone else’s soil.

What he swapped was “Amazon is the company”

The change was not a one-day rebrand.

Public notes put Anker.com online around 2016; offline shelves followed at Costco, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Verizon. Yang’s Verge/Baijing line: to become the go-to charging brand, you need omnichannel—reachable online and offline.

The DTC site stayed small on the P&L for years. Cross-border write-ups citing filings put 2022 independent-site revenue near RMB 676 million, growth about 71.75%, share about 4.75%—still tiny, slope sharp. Other pieces track site share from roughly 2.29% in 2020 toward ~7% by 2023, stressing display, service, and owned users—not merely saving marketplace fees.

Be honest on the numbers: for years, offline and other platforms likely did more to dilute Amazon dependence than the site alone. Marketplace Pulse’s 2021 cut already showed brick-and-mortar dwarfing owned websites.

So why call the site a second growth engine?

Because what the site buys differs from a Walmart shelf. Shelves buy visibility and volume; the site buys who the user is, whether they return, whether email can reach them, who owns the brand story. Anker later bent traffic from “send them to Amazon” toward “send them home”—a change of ownership, not another cash register.

What Yang tore off was identity: stop being only the #1 seller on a platform; become a brand people can meet worldwide. Soundcore, eufy, projection, storage extend categories; DTC and omnichannel extend relationships. The “shallow sea” strategy (skip phone/car deep water; own charging, audio, home) answers which wars to fight; channel migration answers who keeps the victory.