Migrate Ecommerce from Amazon to a Store Your Brand Owns

We have never pretended otherwise. In our 2017 guide to eBay vs Amazon selling, published in May 2017, David laid out why Amazon converts: enormous traffic, a guarantee buyers trust, products organised so shoppers can compare in seconds, and a checkout so easy that buying again takes one tap. None of that has changed, and most of it has grown.

Fulfilment by Amazon takes storage, packing, shipping and returns off your hands and puts the Prime badge on your listing. For a new product, few places put it in front of more ready-to-buy shoppers more quickly.

That is exactly why so many brands end up with most of their revenue in one account. The same guide also warned that more sales do not always add up to more profit, and David still puts it the same way: "more sales doesn't always mean more profit." Profit is the other side of the Amazon story.

Selling on Amazon means agreeing to Amazon's policies, and Amazon applies them at enormous scale, largely by automation. Your account's health is scored, and a dip can mean listings suppressed, inventory stranded in a warehouse, or the account itself put under review.

The triggers are not always things you did. A competitor's complaint about your intellectual property, a cluster of buyer complaints, a policy that changed while you were busy, or a listing edited by someone else can all put sales on hold. Getting reinstated usually means writing an appeal and waiting, while stock sits and fees continue.

Rules you did not write

Amazon decides what you may say in a listing, what you may put in the box, how you may ask for a review, and how you may talk to your buyers. Many of the rules are sensible. But none of them are yours, and they can change at any time.

For most brands the answer is to keep Amazon and stop depending on it alone. Amazon stays your discovery engine, and your own store becomes the place where customers come back. That is the approach at the heart of our Amazon and off-Amazon selling service, and the store is how it starts.

• Win your own traffic. Amazon's rules forbid steering its buyers to your site, including through packaging inserts, so the direct store earns visitors through search, ads, social and email of its own.
• Sell what Amazon cannot. Bundles, subscriptions, exclusive colours, larger sizes, gift sets and personalisation give buyers a reason to come direct without undercutting your Amazon price.
• Capture brand searches. People who hear about you search your name on Google. A direct store that ranks for it turns that demand into customers you own.
• Build the list from day one. Every direct order is a customer you can reach again, which is where the repeat margin lives.
• Share the stock sensibly. Amazon will also ship orders from other channels out of the stock it already holds for you, for a fee, so the store can open without a second warehouse.

This is brand building as much as selling, which is why it sits alongside our brand growth strategy work rather than inside an ad account.

As David puts it, the point of your own store is that "you don't have to answer to Amazon policies." The checkout, the product pages, the pricing, the customer emails and the rules are yours. The page design is built for conversion, the same discipline our ecommerce conversion rate optimization team brings to every store, and the full design process is set out on our custom ecommerce website design hub.

The one migration with no redirects to write

Amazon is the one platform where there is no old URL map to redirect, because the listing pages were never yours. If you already run a small website or another store, we map and 301 redirect every one of its URLs exactly as we would for any migration. Otherwise the move runs like this.

• Content and data audit. Every product, variant, image and piece of content you own, collected from your listings and your own files.
• Data set-up. Products, prices, stock levels and fulfilment rules built into the new store, with the stock split between channels agreed.
• Build. The store designed and built around your best sellers, bundles and the products Amazon does not suit.
• Test index. Every page listed on a private, unindexed address and checked: content, structured data, checkout and test-mode payments.
• Parallel run. Amazon keeps selling as normal. It is the permanent parallel run, and nothing about your listings changes.
• Launch. The direct store opens to its own traffic: branded search, ads, social and email, with tracking in place to measure each one.

If you also sell from a website on another platform, the matching guides cover moving from WooCommerce, from Shopify and from Squarespace.