E-commerce / Amazon
Amazon marketing when somebody else owns the customer.
Amazon is the most efficient distribution a small brand can buy and the least forgiving landlord it can have. The rules change, the fees rise, the customer belongs to the platform, and a category can be reshaped overnight by a decision nobody consulted you about.
Should a brand sell on Amazon or build its own store?
Most brands end up doing both, and the useful question is what each channel is for. Amazon supplies reach, discovery and a buyer who already trusts the checkout. It takes margin in fees, it keeps the customer relationship, and it gives you very little data you can act on elsewhere.
Your own store supplies margin, customer data, the ability to build a relationship and control over the experience. It supplies almost no discovery unless you pay for it.
The strategic risk is letting Amazon become the entire business, because the fees, the rules, the search algorithm and the competitive environment are all controlled by somebody with different interests from yours.
What each channel gives you and takes from you.
Neither answer is right in the abstract. The decision depends on which of these columns your business most needs.
Open the full comparison: What each channel gives you and takes from you.Hide the full comparison: What each channel gives you and takes from you.
| Item | Selling on Amazon | Your own store |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | Substantial, built in | Almost none without paid media |
| Margin | Reduced by fees and advertising | Higher, before acquisition cost |
| Customer data | Minimal and restricted in use | Yours |
| Relationship | Belongs to the platform | Belongs to you |
| Control of experience | Within the template | Complete |
| Risk | Rules, fees and suspensions | You have to create demand |
| Best used for | Reach, testing demand, clearing stock | Repeat purchase and brand building |
The pattern that works for most brands is to treat Amazon as distribution and their own store as the place a customer goes the second time, with everything in the packaging and the follow up designed to make that transition happen.
The listing is the product page, the ad and the ranking signal at once.
On a marketplace the listing does three jobs simultaneously. It has to be found, which depends on how the platform's search reads it. It has to convert, which depends on imagery, title and the answers to the obvious questions. And its conversion rate then feeds back into whether it is found at all.
That creates a compounding loop in both directions. A listing that converts well is shown more, which produces more sales, which produces more reviews, which improves conversion. A listing that converts poorly disappears quietly and the seller concludes the product did not work.
Read the full breakdown: The listing is the product page, the ad and the ranking signal at once.Hide the full breakdown: The listing is the product page, the ad and the ranking signal at once.
The controllable inputs are unglamorous: accurate and complete attributes, images that show scale and use rather than only the product on white, a title that reads as a sentence rather than a keyword list, and content that answers the questions that appear in the question section beneath the listing.
That last one is the most underused source of insight on any marketplace. The questions buyers ask publicly are the objections the listing failed to answer, and they are free market research nobody has to commission.
Reviews are the other loop, and they are governed rather than gamed. The FTC's rule on fake reviews and testimonials covers buying reviews, writing your own and suppressing negative ones, and marketplace policies sit on top of it with their own restrictions on incentivised feedback.
What governs selling and advertising here.
- The FTC's rule on fake reviews and testimonials took effect on 21 October 2024. It covers buying reviews, writing your own, and suppressing negative ones. Every review we help collect is first party, requested from a real customer, and never gated on the rating they intend to leave.
- Any material connection between you and someone endorsing you has to be disclosed clearly and close to the endorsement. Paying, gifting, discounting or employing someone all count as material connections.
- The FTC's Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule requires a seller to have a reasonable basis for any shipping time it advertises, and to ship within 30 days where no time is stated. A dispatch promise in ad copy is a legal representation.
- Marketplace policies sit on top of the law and are enforced faster. Review manipulation, incentivised feedback, inserts asking for positive reviews and contacting buyers outside the permitted channels are all restricted, and enforcement is usually a suspension rather than a conversation.
- Email and phone follow up carry their own rules. CAN-SPAM requires accurate headers, a physical postal address and a working opt out honoured promptly, and calls and texts to consumers sit under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Follow up sequences get built to those rules rather than retrofitted to them.
The practical point is that a marketplace can remove your business overnight for something a website would treat as a warning. Anything that looks like an attempt to influence reviews or to move a buyer off platform deserves checking against the current policy rather than against what worked two years ago.
Branded search is the asset that survives a policy change.
A brand that people search for by name has something no marketplace controls.
Category searches are contested, expensive and owned by whoever is currently winning the platform's algorithm. Brand searches are yours, they convert far better, and they are the clearest signal that the business has built something rather than rented a position.
Watching branded search volume over time is therefore one of the more honest measures of whether a brand is being built. It rises when people encounter the name somewhere and remember it, and it is largely immune to the attribution problems that make marketplace and paid reporting so unreliable.
The practical work is everything outside the marketplace: a website worth visiting, content that answers questions in the category, social presence where the audience is, packaging that gives a customer a reason to look you up, and an email relationship with the people who bought.
None of that produces an immediate return and all of it is what makes the business durable. The brands that find a marketplace change existential are the ones with no branded demand at all.
Five ways to turn a marketplace buyer into a direct customer.
This has to be done within the platform's rules, which are specific about contacting buyers outside permitted channels.
Make the packaging worth keeping
An insert that offers genuine value, registration for a warranty, a guide to using the product, or access to something useful. Not a request for a positive review, which is restricted.
Give a reason that only exists on your site
A refill subscription, a wider range, a bundle, a service or a community. Something the marketplace listing genuinely cannot offer.
Own the brand search
When somebody looks up the name on the packaging, your site should be the obvious first result rather than a reseller or the marketplace listing.
See the remaining steps: Five ways to turn a marketplace buyer into a direct customer.Hide the remaining steps: Five ways to turn a marketplace buyer into a direct customer.
Build the email relationship properly
Once a customer is yours, the marginal cost of reaching them is close to nothing, which is the entire economic argument for the transition.
Stay inside the rules
Marketplace policies restrict contacting buyers outside permitted channels and restrict what an insert may ask for. The transition has to be built on value rather than on circumventing the platform.
Results vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. Nothing here is a guarantee of a ranking, a lead volume or a revenue outcome.
Where the buying is happening.
Statista, citing StatCounter, measures the mobile share of global web traffic excluding tablets. It is a live figure that changes.
SourceStatista citing StatCounter, mobile share of global web traffic, Q2 2026
The Core Web Vitals thresholds beside it are Google's published specification and apply to your own site rather than to the marketplace listing. They matter because the site is where a brand search lands.
Marketplace advertising is a tax that becomes a treadmill.
Sponsored placements on a marketplace work, and their share of the results page has grown steadily. That is not an accident: a platform that takes a fee on the sale and a fee on the visibility has two revenue streams from the same transaction.
The consequence for a seller is that organic position becomes progressively less valuable and advertising becomes progressively less optional. A brand that has built its economics around unpaid marketplace visibility is standing on ground that moves.
Read the full breakdown: Marketplace advertising is a tax that becomes a treadmill.Hide the full breakdown: Marketplace advertising is a tax that becomes a treadmill.
Managing it properly means treating marketplace advertising as an acquisition cost rather than a marketing line, and measuring it against contribution after fees rather than against reported return on ad spend. A product that is profitable at a given advertising cost and unprofitable once fulfilment and referral fees are included is common and easy to miss.
It also means being willing to stop. Not every product should be advertised, and a catalogue where a small number of items carry the profit is better served by concentrating spend than by spreading it across everything.
What a marketplace sale is worth, and how to tell the work is weak.
A marketplace sale is worth its contribution after referral fees, fulfilment, returns and advertising, which is frequently a fraction of the headline price and occasionally negative. That number, per product rather than in aggregate, is the first thing to establish.
Define the goal accordingly. If the objective is reach and the product is a route into a brand relationship, a thin margin on the marketplace can be rational. If the objective is profit on the sale itself, some products should simply not be listed.
Read the full breakdown: What a marketplace sale is worth, and how to tell the work is weak.Hide the full breakdown: What a marketplace sale is worth, and how to tell the work is weak.
Returns are the most under-counted cost in this channel, because the platform makes returning easy by design and the cost lands on the seller. A category with a high return rate can be loss making at a return on ad spend that looks entirely healthy.
How you tell it is being done badly: reporting built on platform reported return on ad spend with no contribution figure, every product advertised at the same level regardless of margin, no branded search growth at all, and a business with no email list after three years of selling.
The vanity metric is marketplace revenue. It is the easiest number in the business to grow and the least informative about whether the business is worth more than it was last year.
Two further numbers are worth watching and rarely are. The proportion of total revenue that comes from a single channel, which is a direct measure of platform risk, and the size of the owned audience, meaning the people the business can reach without paying anybody for permission.
A brand that is ninety percent marketplace with no email list has a single point of failure it has chosen not to look at. Tracking both figures monthly turns that from a vague anxiety into a number somebody is responsible for moving.
What we would do.
E-commerce SEO
Owning your own brand search, so the name on the packaging leads to you.
Shopify Design and Development
A direct store worth visiting once somebody has looked you up.
SEO Content Strategy
Category content that builds demand a marketplace cannot switch off.
Marketing Automation
The email relationship that makes the second purchase cheap.
Conversion Tracking Setup
Contribution after fees, per product, rather than platform reported revenue.
Your website works alongside the store platform you already run.
We do not replace your store platform, we do not migrate it, and we do not ask you to change it. The site links to it from the places a customer is ready to act, and embeds the vendor's own widget where the vendor publishes one. Being plain about the mechanism: that is all it is. Nothing is synced, nothing we build reads or writes your records, and the names below are systems our clients run, not partners of ours. The marketplace owns the transaction and will not hand it over. What a brand site can do is win the search before Amazon does, and make the decision to buy easy wherever it is eventually made.
Store platforms
The platform owns the cart, the checkout and the customer account, and it should keep owning all three. A custom checkout is a liability and the platform's own is not, so we build around it rather than over it.
- Shopify and Shopify Plus
- WooCommerce
- BigCommerce
- Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source
- Ecwid by Lightspeed
Subscriptions and repeat purchase
The subscription tool owns the hardest page you have, which is the one where somebody manages or cancels. We do not replace it. We do argue for making it easy to reach, because a cancellation somebody cannot find becomes a chargeback instead.
- Recharge
- Bold Subscriptions
Email, SMS and reviews
These already own the messages and the review requests. What the site controls is what they have to work with: whether a product page earns the signup, and whether reviews are shown on the page and marked up rather than left sitting in a dashboard.
- Klaviyo
- Attentive
- Mailchimp
- Yotpo
What we actually change
Not the system: the path to it. Where the button sits on the page, whether it says what happens when you press it, how many taps it takes from a phone, whether it appears again at the point a customer has finished reading and decided, and whether somebody who is not ready yet has a second way to reach you. That path is ours, it is measurable, and in most store audits it is the part doing the damage.
Where the handoff is only a link
Some vendors publish an embeddable widget and some publish nothing at all. Where there is nothing to embed and no deep link worth pointing at, the site sends the visitor to your booking page or your login and stops there. That is a perfectly good outcome and we would rather say so than describe a seam we cannot remove. What we can do is make the destination unsurprising, so nobody arrives wondering whether they are still dealing with you.
Get a marketplace and brand review.
We look at contribution per product after all fees, at your branded search trend, and at whether anything you own is being built alongside the channel.
One caveat on all of that. These are descriptions of rules as they are published today, not legal advice about your situation. They differ by state and they change, sometimes quietly, so check the current wording with your own counsel or compliance officer before you rely on any of it. Where a rule touches your marketing we write to the stricter reading and send it to you for sign off before anything publishes.
Straight answers.
Should we sell on Amazon or build our own store?
Most brands do both, and the useful framing is what each is for. The marketplace supplies discovery and a trusted checkout; your own store supplies margin, data and a relationship.
The risk is letting the marketplace become the whole business, because the fees, rules and search behaviour are controlled by somebody with different interests from yours.
How do we move marketplace buyers to our own site?
By giving them a reason that only exists on your site, such as a subscription, a wider range, a service or a community, and by making the brand easy to find when they look it up.
It has to be done inside the rules. Marketplace policies restrict contacting buyers outside permitted channels and restrict what an insert may ask for, particularly around reviews.
Can we offer a discount in exchange for a review?
On a marketplace, no: policy restricts incentivised feedback and enforces it faster than any regulator, usually with a suspension. The FTC position is narrower than it is usually reported. Its rule prohibits providing compensation or other incentives in exchange for, or conditioned on, reviews expressing a particular sentiment, so a discount for a positive review is squarely inside it. A discount offered for an honest review whatever it says is not prohibited by that rule, but the incentive has to be disclosed, and marketplace policy forbids it regardless.
Enforcement on a marketplace is usually a suspension rather than a warning, which makes this one of the most consequential compliance points in the channel.
Why is our marketplace advertising cost rising?
Because sponsored placements have taken a growing share of the results page, which makes organic position progressively less valuable and advertising progressively less optional.
Manage it as an acquisition cost against contribution after all fees rather than against reported return on ad spend, and be willing to stop advertising products that do not justify it.
What should we measure?
Contribution after referral fees, fulfilment, returns and advertising, per product. Then branded search volume over time, which is the clearest indicator of whether a brand is being built.
Marketplace revenue is the easiest number to grow and the least informative about whether the business is worth more than last year.
Is the buyer question section useful?
It is the best free market research available in the channel. Every question is an objection your listing failed to answer.
Answering them in the listing itself, rather than only in the question thread, usually improves conversion more than any imagery change.
How do we protect ourselves from a policy change?
By building branded demand and an owned audience alongside the channel. A brand people search for by name and a list you can email are the two assets a platform cannot take away.
Businesses that find a marketplace change existential are almost always the ones with neither.
Should we use the marketplace's own fulfilment service?
It usually improves visibility and conversion inside the platform and it deepens the dependency, because unwinding it later means rebuilding logistics you no longer run.
Model the cost honestly including storage and long term fees, and be clear that convenience is being bought with both margin and optionality.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- Amazon: selling policies and seller code of conduct (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: final rule banning fake reviews and testimonials (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: endorsement guides, what people are asking (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: complying with the Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Central: product structured data (opens in a new tab)
- Google web.dev: Core Web Vitals (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Central: ecommerce site structure best practices (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.