Kan is preparing an Amazon storefront and will start selling some Kan products in June 2025
This article shares a significant shift in Kan’s approach to our products being sold on Amazon, and we’re pleased to proactively update our customers on this change in direction. Since our founding in 1987, Kan has sold only to practitioners and to a small number of distributors. When a practitioner account is created, Kan staff request a current copy of the health care provider’s license, and we individually confirm the validity of that license before new orders are fulfilled. Creation of a new practitioner account also requires agreement with terms and conditions. Those terms include a promise not to resell to anyone besides patients individually treated by the practitioner themselves. Kan’s distributors follow the same process (validating a current license, agreement not to resell).
Ongoing Challenges
And yet, for a number of years now, Kan products have been sold on Amazon. This is only possible because some practitioners are violating the terms of their Kan account and choosing to sell on Amazon anyway. To date, our approach has been to remind the Amazon-selling practitioner that we do not allow such reselling, and to freeze their account until the practice is corrected. We have also permanently closed accounts of repeat offenders. This approach requires constant vigilance and is essentially a losing game of “whack-a-mole,” since some practitioners are creatively motivated to set up new Amazon selling accounts under different names, and somehow keep getting products from Kan or our distributors.
Threats Posed by Amazon Sales
Kan products being resold on Amazon or other online platforms presents numerous challenges, beyond establishing a bad faith relationship between Kan and the offending practitioner. Patients can skip their appointment with you and go get a cheap bottle of herbs, which can lead to ineffective use of herbs, and loss of patient business for you. It’s in fact possible that the products are counterfeit, or adulterated in some other way. Because the products are labeled with our name, however, Kan would nonetheless be implicated in any possible adverse reactions claims by an injured patient. This product liability is a serious threat to Kan’s financial health.
Illicit online sales also threaten Kan’s reputation and our ability to control prices, since sellers can manipulate the sales price. The reputation of this medicine may also be damaged because patients are less likely to benefit from herbs they take without the guidance of your professional experience and informed care.
Solution – An Ongoing Experiment
The solution Kan is choosing to address all of these challenges is to begin selling on Amazon ourselves, at a markup of 125% above your practitioner wholesale price. This decision was not taken lightly, and after lengthy deliberations we realized that this is the best way to fully address the above concerns. Our prior practice of policing Amazon selling on a case-by-case basis used a lot of staff resources to achieve transient gains, and it was simply ineffective. We’ve made the decision to use those limited staff resources to best serve you in other ways.
Beginning in June 2025, Kan is preparing our Amazon seller account and has begun listing certain products that are already selling on Amazon by others. We are starting with Kan Essentials, our line of pet products, as those are the most commonly sold on Amazon. This is an experiment to explore how effective this new approach is at policing illicit sales of Kan products. We have set the sales price high enough that we are confident Kan will not compete with practitioners selling directly to patients. Our research shows that few practitioners are selling to patients above 225% of the price at which they buy products from Kan (which is how we arrived at 125% markup above the price you pay from Kan). We will now begin a transition period for illicit sellers to sell off their existing inventory. This could take a number of months, after which we expect Kan to be the only seller.
You Can Improve & Inform this Experiment with Feedback
This new approach is a risk we are taking because other efforts have not been successful, and we are motivated to find the narrow path that protects the tradition of this valuable medicine, our relationship with licensed practitioners, and the needs to protect brand identity, product liability exposure, price control and revenue generation.
To see what Kan’s new presence on Amazon will look like, please check out this first Amazon product listing. Note on the screenshots below how you can identify Kan’s official product listing versus one by an illicit seller.
I welcome your input on how we can do this right. Please, share how this news lands with you: Give Kan Feedback on Amazon Experiment. It’s a modern, fast-moving ecommerce world out there, and Amazon is a part of our current reality. Help us with feedback to share how we’re doing. Thank you, in advance, for your guidance. And thank you, as always for the helping, healing, and caretaking work you invest in every day.