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I have a very small number of returns on Amazon, since my product can't be used and then returned. Amazon isn't terrible, but it has two big problems for me. First, margins are lower because I'm not only paying them a cut of every sale, I'm also paying for Amazon advertising. Second, I don't have a relationship with the buyer, which is the real killer. I do really well with repeat sales via email, and those are where the real margin is since I'm not paying to acquire those users again. On my site, I can afford to break even (or even lose a little money) on the first sale, where I must make money on each sale on Amazon. I will say the one big difference between my product and many on Amazon is that it's not something that you seek out - very few people are searching for "dog treat mix" on Amazon (or Google/Bing/etc.). Amazon does have some types of advertising that work well for targeting other luxury dog goods, but my volume is going to be limited there. Facebook advertising works better for me, because I can target people by demographics and explain the product in an ad. To that point, it may be important to be on Amazon if you're in a commodity business. On the other hand, it sucks to be in a commodity business for so many other reasons that I hardly think it's reasonable to pin the blame on Amazon for the difficulties there. The one thing I will say about Amazon vs. Shopify that surprised me is that Amazon's support tends to be quite competent (at least if you call them - you get nothing but canned responses via email), while Shopify's is just terrible. They can help with basic issues using the software, but when it comes to real problems, like bugs in reporting (or more recently in my case, a bug where they undercharged a customer), they just say they'll get back to you and never do unless you are incredibly aggressive about hounding them. |