Amazon.com's Sam Wheeler is returning to his roots by joining a start-up after 11 years with the online retailer. Mr. Wheeler joined Amazon.com when it acquired the start-up Junglee, where Wheeler was Director of Sales. His resume reflects Amazon's evolution of third-party sales, having played a part in Auctions, zShops, Amazon.com Apparel & Sporting Goods and Merchants@ and becoming Director Strategic Partnerships in 2005. When he left Amazon.com last month, he was Director of Demand Generation, responsible for demand generation, marketing and development of Amazon.com's Channel Sales program.

Mr. Wheeler was Amazon.com's very first sales person, and in his early days called on retailers such as J&R Electronics, Footlocker and Gap. He said the concept of Amazon.com opening up its site to other retailers back then was as radical as Target partitioning off a corner of its brick-and-mortar store for other retailers. It was difficult internally as well, and said CEO Jeff Bezos is due a lot of credit for taking that step.

Asked about the challenges of bringing sellers onto the existing retail platform, Mr. Wheeler told AuctionBytes, "For branded sellers the biggest challenge has been integrating their systems with our systems. As you might guess large retailers have complex IT infrastructure each with its own unique issues. While we have tried our best to solve for as many of the issues we've seen in the marketplace, retailers often have little quirks that are unique unto themselves and this can make it hard to get both our systems talking. We are however seeing fewer and fewer issues around this as more and more retailers build infrastructure that can easily integrate into our system."

As for the current trend of retailers opening their websites to third-party merchants, he said it "feels a lot like "me too."" Retailers want to be every single place that they can effectively manage, he said. But with each marketplace requiring a different data feed and slightly different models and rules of engagement, it can be complex.

And why did Amazon.com abandon the auction format? "We started third party selling first with Auctions, then we tried zShops and finally realized that marketplace - where sellers place their products on the same page as Amazon.com retail was the right solution. This was the right reason for a number of reasons.

"First: The product detail page is where all buying traffic is driven. Amazon has amazing systems that focus on moving traffic to the product detail page so buyers can make a purchase decision. Having the same item sitting in two or three different places (Auctions and zShops) wasn't good for our customers. 2. Auctions are simply a pricing tool and in retail, where there is typically no scarcity of product, auctions tend to be sub optimal. Buyers have a pretty good idea how much they should pay for a retail item. 3. Amazon shoppers value convenience. We find that Amazon shoppers enjoy finding an item and buying it on the spot. They don't want to engage in a bidding war, they want to buy the item and move on. For these reasons buyers have embraced our marketplace service."

Mr. Wheeler attended eBay seller events as part of his Amazon.com Merchants@ recruitment. He summed up the difference in sellers' attitude about customer service on multiple channels by relating what an eBay seller told him: "If I get a complaint from an eBay buyer, I have 30 - 35 days to deal with it. If it's my own customer on my website, I deal with it within 24 hours. If it's a customer on Amazon.com, I deal with it immediately." Wheeler said this is because sellers knew that once they got kicked off of Amazon, they were not allowed back on, unlike eBay, where they could find ways to get back on, he said. He attributes much of Amazon.com's success to its obsessive focus on the customer.

Before joining Amazon.com, Wheeler was responsible for business relationships in the electronic classified category at Junglee, and had been Manager of Electronic Classifieds for Dow Jones, where he was responsible for the development and launch of The Wall Street Journal's career website CareerJournal.com.

Mr. Wheeler has joined startup Optify.net as its ninth employee. The company provides B2B lead generation and search engine optimization services.