[drchiu]

I echo your sentiment as well (also from a background of having ran a Shopify app with thousands of installs).

There's a lot of misconception of how much hard work it is amongst beginner Shopify merchants in order to generate sufficient traffic. Amazon, at the very least, provides an audience -- which solves a very major problem for any business (to get traffic).

There's a lot of success stories running on Shopify, but these companies would have pretty done well creating their own custom solution.

At the end of the day, it's a piece of software (ie. shovel) to sell to people who want to try and make money online (ie. the gold rush).

[quickthrower2]

Why not do both? Amazon gets you your first orders. You ship with a note saying visit mystore.com for the full range, and sign up for discounts at mystore.com/discounts.

[ganeshkrishnan]

This would get you quickly banned on Amazon.

[quickthrower2]

Really. I’m not a seller so I didn’t know. But that’s almost serfdom.

[gruez]

How is not being able to freeload off a platform for free advertising even close to serfdom?

[quickthrower2]

You set up a successful business on Amazon having done a lot of marketing yourself and now you are forced to use them to sell everything. You are now working for Amazon, or lose your business.