For most brands the honest answer is both, in a sequence, with a clear decision about which channel generates demand and which one captures it. Around 90 percent of the brands Evestar works with sell on Amazon. The question worth arguing about is not whether to be there, it is what job Amazon is doing for you once you are.
We acquired an Amazon agency in 2025 specifically to bring the channel inside our full service offering, because we did not think we could run a credible ecommerce growth programme while treating the largest product search engine in the world as somebody else’s problem.
That said, the decision is not automatic, and any article that gives you a universal answer is selling something. It turns on four things: what your margin structure can absorb, how much you need to own the customer relationship, how much control over presentation your product requires, and whether you have the operational capacity to run a second channel properly. Most brands that regret the decision either way made it on one of those four and ignored the other three.
If your category is popular on Amazon and your competitors are already there, you should be there. Buyers in that category have already decided where they search, and declining to participate does not remove the demand, it just hands it to whoever is listed.
Amazon owns its customers, and that is the point. We are all Amazon customers. We trust the shipping speed, we trust the returns policy, and we do not think twice about the checkout. That accumulated trust is a real asset and it is not yours, but you can sell into it. So if you started on Shopify and you can see that people are already searching for your product on Amazon, you are leaving money on the table.
Selling on Amazon introduces costs that DTC does not have: referral fees, fulfilment costs if you use FBA, storage, returns handling, and advertising, which on Amazon is effectively mandatory because organic placement in a crowded category is difficult without it. DTC has its own cost stack, and it is not obviously lighter: customer acquisition cost, payment processing, platform and app subscriptions, fulfilment, and the fixed cost of the team.
The useful comparison is not gross margin, it is contribution margin per channel after all channel specific costs, including advertising. Run that calculation on your own numbers before reading anyone’s opinion, including this one. The specific fee figures matter and they change, so check them against Amazon’s current published schedule rather than against anyone’s summary.
This is the difference that does not reverse, and it cuts both ways. On DTC you own the customer record: the email address, the purchase history, the ability to run retention and to launch to an existing audience. That asset compounds. On Amazon the customer is substantially Amazon’s. You gain a buyer and the transaction, but the ongoing relationship is mediated.
What most comparisons miss is that Amazon’s ownership of the customer is also the reason the channel converts. The buyer is not evaluating whether to trust a checkout, a delivery promise or a returns process, because Amazon has already answered all three. You are borrowing that trust. The correct response is not to refuse the channel, it is to build an owned audience somewhere else at the same time.
Amazon standardises the buying experience, and that standardisation is precisely why it converts so well: buyers know the format, trust the reviews and checkout, and do not have to evaluate a new site. The cost is that your brand is presented in the same frame as every competitor, differentiated mainly by images, copy, reviews and price. If your product’s value depends on explanation, demonstration or education, the channel works against you. If it is understood in three seconds and competes on quality and price, the channel works for you.
The practical consequence is that listing quality is not housekeeping, it is the entire brand expression on that channel. Images, title, bullets, A+ content and review volume are doing the job your website, creative and landing pages do everywhere else.
This is the variable most consistently underestimated. Running Amazon properly is an operations job as much as a marketing one: catalogue and listing hygiene, inventory planning against fulfilment requirements, review management, category and compliance issues, and advertising management, which is a discipline of its own and does not run itself. Adding the channel without adding the capacity to run it is the most common way brands conclude “Amazon did not work for us,” when what actually happened is that nobody had the hours to run it.
Once you accept that you should be on Amazon, the real question is whether Amazon is a leading channel or a demand capture channel for your brand. A leading channel generates demand, creating awareness among people who were not looking for you. A demand capture channel converts demand that already exists. Amazon is overwhelmingly the second. It is a search environment, and search environments capture intent, they do not manufacture it.
This is where the biggest mistake happens. Brands treat Amazon as a standalone business when what they are actually trying to do is build a brand. They staff it separately, budget it separately, judge it on its own ROAS, and then ask why growth has stalled. The answer is usually that there is only so much search volume for the product, the category is crowded with competitors bidding on the same terms, and nobody is generating new demand to capture. You cannot capture your way out of a demand problem. Most brands need both offense and defense. Very few have decided which is which.
For brands starting from ground zero, particularly in CPG, beauty, food and beverage and supplements, we usually do not open both channels at once. Phase one is Shopify first: build the website, build the content, start the ads, build awareness and get the brand in front of people who have never heard of it. This establishes that the product converts, that the creative works, and that there is a reason for anyone to search for the brand by name.
Phase two, roughly three months later, opens the Amazon store. By this point there is demand in the market to capture, the creative has been tested, and the listing can be built with evidence about what actually persuades people rather than guesses. Opening Amazon on day one for a brand nobody has heard of usually means paying Amazon to introduce you to a category where you have no reviews, no velocity and no differentiation. The sequence exists so that when the listing goes live, it has something to catch.
Because Evestar is a full service agency running three points of sale for the same brand, we are not under pressure to make Amazon look good in isolation. Instead of opening with heavy Amazon ad spend, we start by building the asset: proper listings, review generation, A+ content, and the catalogue hygiene that lets a product rank when velocity arrives. Then we let Amazon capture the demand Meta is generating.
In some accounts we have seen as many as 80 percent of the shoppers we target on Meta choose to complete the purchase on Amazon rather than on the brand’s own site. Those buyers were created by the paid social programme. If the listing is not ready to receive them, that spend converts for a competitor. An agency that only runs Amazon has to justify Amazon ad spend. An agency that runs the whole programme can afford to spend where the return actually is.
All of this depends on being able to answer one question: how much is each channel contributing to the others? That is halo, or lift measurement, and it is the discipline Evestar is built around. We measure how every channel supports every other one, rather than reading each platform’s self reported numbers and hoping they add up. Meta says it drove the sale. Amazon says it drove the sale. Google says it drove the sale. Somebody is wrong, and usually everybody is. Very few brands and very few agencies can actually calculate halo, and it is the single most useful thing we can tell a brand about its Amazon question, because the offense or defense decision is unanswerable without it.
For most established ecommerce brands the answer is not either or, it is sequencing and proportion. Amazon captures demand from buyers who search there first and who would not have found or trusted your site. DTC builds the owned audience, carries margin and retention, and is where brand equity accrues. The failure modes are on the extremes: a brand entirely dependent on Amazon has built a business on a platform it does not control, and a brand that refuses Amazon on principle while its category is heavily searched there is declining demand that exists whether it participates or not, often while unauthorised third party sellers list its products anyway.
If you want a decision procedure rather than a discussion:
If the category is popular on Amazon and competitors are already listed there, yes. Around 90 percent of the brands we work with sell on Amazon. The demand exists whether or not you participate, and buyers who search on Amazon are rarely persuaded to go looking for your website instead. The genuine exceptions are products whose value cannot survive a standardised listing format, and brands without the operational capacity to run the channel properly.
For a brand starting from zero, particularly in CPG, beauty, food and beverage or supplements, we usually launch on Shopify first: site, content, ads, awareness. Amazon opens in phase two, roughly three months later, once there is demand in the market for the listing to capture and tested creative to build it from.
It depends entirely on category, price point and cost structure, and it cannot be answered generally. Compare contribution margin per channel after all channel specific costs, with advertising loaded on the Amazon side and acquisition cost loaded on the DTC side. Many brands find the answer is not what they assumed.
Yes, and most established brands do. The main considerations are pricing consistency across channels, inventory allocation, and deciding which channel gets new launches first.
Some substitution is normal, in that a portion of buyers who would have purchased on your site will purchase on Amazon instead. In some accounts we have seen as many as 80 percent of shoppers targeted on Meta prefer to complete the purchase on Amazon. That is not lost revenue, it is revenue landing on a different channel, and the risk is only that your reporting fails to notice.
In competitive categories advertising eventually becomes necessary, because organic placement is influenced by sales velocity. But we do not open with aggressive Amazon ad spend. We build listings, reviews and A+ content first, and let Amazon capture the demand paid social is already generating. Advertising scales a listing that converts, it does not fix one that does not.
Treating Amazon as a standalone business when what they are actually building is a brand. Amazon is a demand capture channel. If it is staffed, budgeted and judged in isolation, nobody asks the more important question, which is who is generating the demand in the first place.
Tell us your category and your margins and our Amazon growth team will help you decide what job Amazon should do for your brand.