Sell on Amazon and Off Amazon: Take Back Control of Your Brand

Be fair to Amazon first, because the plan depends on keeping what works. Amazon brings shoppers who are already holding their wallets. People go there to buy rather than to browse, and the checkout they trust is one click away.

• Traffic with intent. A product listed well in the right category can sell without the brand bringing a single visitor.
• Trusted checkout. Saved payment details, familiar returns and the A-to-z Guarantee remove most of the doubt a first-time buyer has about a brand they have never heard of.
• Logistics. Fulfillment by Amazon stores, packs and ships for you, and Prime eligibility puts fast delivery on your listing.
• Proof of demand. A new product can find out quickly whether people will buy it, before you build a whole store around it.

We wrote about all of this on this site in May 2017, in David's guide to eBay vs Amazon selling. The specific fees and payout rules have changed since then, but the trade-off he described has not: Amazon's traffic and trust on one side, its costs and its rules on the other.

On Amazon, the rules are Amazon's, and they change. A business that lives entirely on one marketplace can be damaged by a single decision it had no part in.

• Account health. Suspensions and listing suppressions can follow from complaints, policy interpretations or paperwork, and appeals take time while sales stop.
• Other sellers on your listing. Without protection, resellers and counterfeiters can sell on your product page, undercut your price, and leave your brand with their reviews.
• No customer relationship. Buyer contact details are masked, marketing messages are not allowed, and inserts that send buyers to your own site are prohibited. You can sell to a customer once and never reach them again.
• Rules and fees that move. New fees, category restrictions and changes to how listings rank arrive on Amazon's schedule, not yours.

None of that makes Amazon a bad channel, but it does make it a risky one to depend on alone.

The off-Amazon channel starts with a store you own and traffic you earn. Your own store is the one place you control the price, the page, the data and the customer.

What your own store can do that Amazon will not let you

• Build a list. Ask for consent and keep selling to the same customer through email flows built for online stores, the channel Amazon closes off.
• Sell bundles, sets and exclusives that are not on Amazon, so the store has its own reasons to visit.
• Run subscriptions and loyalty rewards on your own terms.
• Tell the brand's story with the design, content and photography that justify your price.

Bringing the traffic

A store needs visitors before it can sell anything. The traffic comes from category and product pages built to rank for what you sell, which is the work of SEO for online stores, from Google Shopping and search ads that put your own store next to the marketplace listing, and from Meta and Instagram campaigns that find new buyers. Our ecommerce ads management service covers the paid side, run to protect margin rather than to chase revenue.

People who find your brand on Amazon also search for it by name. Owning that search result is one of the cheapest wins available, and it only happens if your own site exists and is built to be found.

A store that earns its keep

The store itself has to be good enough to win a buyer who could have clicked "Buy Now" on Amazon instead. That means fast pages, clear product information, honest shipping and returns, and a checkout as easy as the one they already trust. A template that looks like everyone else's gives the shopper no reason to choose you over the marketplace, which is why our custom ecommerce store design work starts from how your buyers shop and what makes the brand different. Launch with your best sellers and the products Amazon does not carry, then widen the range as the traffic grows.

For most brands the answer sits between leaving Amazon and living on it: know what every Amazon sale earns, protect the brand there, and grow a channel you own beside it, in an order and at a pace the margin can carry. That is the same thinking behind our brand growth strategy work, where unit economics come before spend.

For select brands and products, the off-Amazon build can also run under our commission only marketing model, where we fund the marketing up front and are paid out of the sales it produces. That only works when the numbers do, so the per-product margin work above comes first either way.

Start with the numbers, then the store, then the traffic. The rest of our ecommerce marketing agency services are there for each step, and the first one is a conversation about your products.