The warehouse on Rochester’s north side doesn’t look like much from the outside. But inside, pallets of a made-in-America medical device arrive from U.S. contract manufacturers, get sorted by customer, and move out the door — to hospitals, a nationwide network of eyecare clinics and institutions, and to Amazon, where they reach individual patients across the country. From here, Dr. Alyssa Song, the Mayo Clinic graduate who built Nanodropper from a student startup into a Rochester-based medical device company, is planning her next move: taking Nanodropper global, with Amazon.
Nanodropper makes an adapter that fits onto nearly any eye drop bottle and delivers the right size drop of medication for the human eye. Standard bottles were designed to dispense drops up to five times larger than the eye can hold, a known flaw documented since the 1980s. It means patients on expensive medications are using more than they should until they run out, and often before insurance covers a refill. Song’s adapter makes a bottle last three times as long at roughly one third the per-dose cost.
Nanodropper’s adapters, which come in two sizes to fit nearly any eye drop bottle,dispense drops small enough for the human eye to absorb without waste.
The company first grew by selling directly into eyecare clinics and hospitals, educating doctors who would then reach their patients. It worked, and Nanodropper built a clinical nationwide network of more than 3,000 providers. But individual patient sales never took off. “Doctors knew about us, and they were talking to their patients about us,” said co-founder and chief commercial officer Mackenzie Andrews, “but the actual sales had kind of reached what felt like this ceiling. We were sitting at the same dollar amount month over month.”
The ‘aha moment’ came when Song and Andrews analyzed their web traffic. The top search term driving visitors to their website had been “Nanodropper Amazon” for more than a year. With that knowledge, they launched in Amazon’s store immediately; it was July 2020. And, just as quickly, said Song, direct to consumer sales climbed 150%. “Amazon has been a really good partner to us,” said Song. “We couldn’t have anticipated the increase in reach that we would have [with Amazon]. For us, it’s really about scale of impact, getting Nanodropper into the hands of everyone who needs it.”
Song calls Amazon their “gateway for increasing our scale of impact.” That gateway, she said, is a path of seller tools; each one built to work the other and built to drive their success not just in Amazon’s store, but across all their sales channels. Individual patient sales work differently than clinical sales. A patient searching in the Amazon store needs to find the right product, understand it immediately, and receive it fast. Each tool in Nanodropper’s stack is built around that customer journey.
Song chose Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to handle Nanodropper’s direct-to-consumer logistics. With FBA, Amazon warehouses, packs, ships, and manages customer service on Nanodropper’s behalf, giving patients the speed they need. FBA frees Nanodropper’s Rochester team from fulfilling individual orders and allows them to focus on bulk shipments direct to hospitals, clinics, and Amazon.
A+ Content and their Amazon Brand Store handle the education. Nanodropper is the first product of its kind, which means customers don’t always know to look for it, and when they find it, they don’t always know which size to buy. “When you’re the first to create a new category in an industry,” Song said, “you have to define it and then you have to teach everyone about it.” A+ Content gives Nanodropper the space to explain compatibility and walk patients through their options directly on the product listing page, where the purchase decision is being made. The Amazon Brand Store extends that education further, giving the team room to tell the company’s story and show the product in action, including video that demonstrates exactly how the adapter works.
Andrews and Dr. Song at work in Nanodropper’s Rochester fulfillment center, where orders ship to hospitals, eye care clinics, and to Amazon for delivery to individual patients across the country.
Amazon customer reviews have become one of the team’s most valuable product development inputs. Song reads them personally, and the feedback loop is direct. “As a company, we respond to Amazon reviews,” she said. “We directly reach out to them. We take their concerns into consideration in our product development lifecycle, and we even launched that second size as direct feedback from the Amazon reviews.”
In 2026, Seller Assistant is the newest tool of choice for Nanodropper. Amazon’s AI-powered tool, available through Seller Central, lets the team ask plain-English questions about their business and get concrete, actionable answers. A question like “we spent this amount in ads this month and saw this type of sales — how can we better utilize that same ad spend to grow our sales next month?” returns next steps, alongside data. For monthly analytics meetings, explained Andrews, it replaces what would otherwise require weeks of manually gathering and reconciling numbers from multiple sources. The insights it surfaces drive decisions across all of Nanodropper’s sales channels.
“As a company, being nimble and responsive is probably one of the most valuable things you can be,” said Andrews. “Having Seller Assistant which allows us to make quick, iterative decisions and be very confident in those decisions has been so valuable.”
From their Rochester headquarters, Nanodropper is now expanding into Canada and Mexico with Amazon, translating its packaging and instructions to meet Health Canada requirements. The same tools driving growth in the US will carry the company to new patients across North and Central America. “We’re continuing to see month over month, year over year growth, and I think with the international expansion, we’ll continue to see that,” said Andrews.
“Our motto is small drops, big vision,” Song said. “And we really don’t shy away from the big vision part of that.”