Over the past year or so, a tremendous amount of businesses have sprung up that sell exclusively on Amazon. This is mostly due to the success of training programs such as Amazing Selling Machine (ASM) and other similar programs. These programs teach how to select products, source them from suppliers, private label them, and optimize their sales on Amazon.
Those that learn this way typically move from a product, to a product line, to a brand, which can eventually really be considered a business. Of course, only a small percentage get that far. As with all training, various factors determine success, including good product selection and how much effort and experience the business owner has to contribute.
Of those that do fairly well, they end up in a precarious situation. That is, they are almost completely dependent on Amazon for income. That is why they often turn to Shopify.
As I wrote on my blog, Shopify is now THE e-commerce platform. If you want to sell products on your own domain, there is not better way. Over the past three months, I’ve been neck-deep in learning the Shopify platform. To do so as quickly and effectively as possible, I bought into a training by renowned e-commerce expert Ezra Firestone name One Stop Shop. His video based training was simple to follow and his included template is optimized for conversions. Using this method, we were able to go live with our new site in about two months.
So now that we’ve created this site for my Hippo business, it will be even easier to create one for our Amazon business. There are far less products, so it will likely only take about a month to create a complete e-commerce site. But that’s the easy part.
The hard part to a Shopify site is not creating it, but getting qualified traffic to it.
Therefore, it probably should not be a priority for most Amazon sellers. Get your sales on Amazon. Once you’re selling $25K or even $50K per month, you might want to start building an e-commerce site to compliment what you’re doing. As you build brand awareness on Amazon, some of your buyers may start looking for your site outside of Amazon for better prices, which is wise.
Another benefit to this is that you now own the official “manufacturer” site which you can point to. There are times when this comes in very handy when dealing with Amazon’s catalog team, especially when dealing with hijackers of your Amazon listing.
