Selling on Your Own Website vs Setting Up an Amazon Store – Comparing the Tactics

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Should you develop your own website or consider joining popular marketplaces? Let’s compare the options to find the most winning one.

The Pros and Cons of Selling on Amazon

Being the most popular retail marketplace ever, Amazon hardly needs an introduction. This is one of the top places modern users choose to access the widest choice range, shop at the best price, and take advantage of quick shipping. Let’s take a deeper look at the pros and cons of running an eCommerce business on Amazon.

Amazon Business Advantages

  • Global reach. There are nearly 200 million Amazon users worldwide. Every day, the marketplace ships 1,6 million packages per day, while 18 orders are placed on Amazon per second. Joining such a popular and dynamic marketplace can be a good idea in terms of customers’ reach and growing your store day after day.
  • Low getting started costs. The cost to get started with an eCommerce Amazon store is pretty low. For example, you can create an individual seller account for just $40 per month, plus pay a symbolic fee for each transaction on the marketplace. Mature businesses are welcome to choose more advanced subscriptions, unlocking more promotional opportunities but paying higher fees in exchange.
  • Quick launch. Setting up an eCommerce Amazon store is a process that will take up to several hours. The most important condition to get it done is to provide Amazon with authentic information about your business, and bank credentials.
  • Leveraging social proof. The opportunity to gather real customer feedback is another one the sellers appreciate. What’s more, the seller’s rating directly affects the search discoverability of a store, improving your chances of capturing prospective leads.

Amazon Store Drawbacks

  • No branding opportunities. In contrast to all the benefits above, Amazon comes with no branding opportunities so standing out of the crowd is pretty difficult in the marketplace. The only way to compete is to sell products of great quality, gather user feedback, and pay the greatest attention to the Amazon SEO optimization of your product descriptions. An opportunity to build a branded website within the platform is available only for those sellers who are registered in an Amazon brand registry and meet eligibility criteria.
  • A lot of tech and marketing specifics. Also, running an Amazon e-commerce business requires you to be well-versed in platform-specific tech and marketing specifics. For example, you will have to deal with Amazon analytics dashboards that aren’t as intuitive and complete as you would like them to be. As for Amazon marketing, the marketplace allows you to set up Sponsored Ads campaigns but the highest bets are still placed on Amazon organic search.
  • Fierce competition. There are 10 million sellers on Amazon, and most of them offer a lot of similar items. That’s why competing on Amazon is a challenge, especially for novice sellers – you either have to sell something truly trendy and standing out, or get ready to pay a lot for Amazon promotion.
  • Higher costs for the long run. As a rule, the eCommerce Amazon costs are running in response to your business growth. To put it simply, the more you sell – the more you pay for it, plus you have to keep investing in Amazon promotions to hold your winning positions.

The Pros and Cons of Creating Your Own eCommerce Website

Creating your own website is a tactic that can be a decent alternative to joining Amazon. Let’s review its pros and cons in more detail to find out which of the options will be the most value-adding for your business.

The Pros of Having Your eCommerce Website

  • Ultimate customizability and branding. One of the main benefits of creating a custom eCommerce website is the opportunity to embed any design and branding solution that will help you stand out in the eCommerce market. What’s more, you are welcome to choose the most suitable content management system (CMS) with a feature set that will perfectly correspond to your business goals. Magento, for instance, is one of them. It allows for creating technically powerful and perfectly customizable eCommerce solutions with great scalability potential.
  • Total control of your website. Unlike your own website, the Amazon store is almost impossible to control. The business process in this marketplace directly depends on Amazon policies which are changing frequently. Your own website, in turn, promises an opportunity to play the eCommerce game on your terms.
  • More data-driven insights. What’s more, an Amazon store comes with limited opportunities for data gathering and analysis. Your website, in turn, can become a great pool for gathering customer insights, tracking their behavior patterns, testing different design solutions and marketing strategies, and finally finding the approach that works wonders for your business and customers.

Conclusion – the Smartest Strategy for Your eCommerce Business

So, when it comes to Amazon vs own website choice, which tactic would be the winning one for your business? At this point, let’s remember the pillars of LEAN development methodology; namely, the suggestion to test before investing.

According to this logic, validating your product idea and discovering its market demand is the step you should make before custom website development. Amazon can be a good place for idea validation at a low cost, and then, you will be able to calmly invest in developing your online presence.