Looking to sell your products and merchandise online?
Keeping up with your business’s demands is harder now that the pandemic is hitting us hard. Most companies shut down without having a chance to bring themselves back from the brink. If you don’t want to be among the 100,000 businesses who closed due to the pandemic, you need to sell your products online.
How do you sell your products online, though? You have to choose between Amazon vs Shopify, the 2 giants of the e-commerce world. Each platform has its perks and issues associated with them.
To know which is better for your business, read on. We’ll help you choose between the two popular platforms.
1. Customizability
Let’s dive into the customizability of these platforms first. This is important since having customizability allows you to define your brand. Shopify trumps Amazon in this aspect since Shopify is a cloud-based SaaS.
This means that it only helps you by making your website an e-commerce website. It gives you a shopping cart solution and allows you to post products in your store with ease. It also gives you an admin panel to customize your store page.
What’s great about it is that it enables you to customize your website, too. You can define your brand identity with the freedom that Shopify gives you. On Amazon, the only customizability you have is with your product description.
If you’re confident with how your products will sell, choose Shopify for its customizability. With how important brand identity is, you will want to have freedom in customization.
2. Traffic Generation
More traffic generation means more people going to your shops to check out your merchandise. This means you will want more of it to increase your chances of making a sale. When it comes to traffic generation, this is where Amazon is ahead of Shopify.
This is Amazon’s biggest appeal since having more visibility means more customers. This is thanks to Amazon being the older and more popular platform. Those who come to the platform are always looking for something to buy.
Amazon even rewards businesses that drive traffic to their websites. This is because it increases the platform’s search engine optimization score by redirecting them to reliable webpages.
With Shopify, you’re pretty much in charge of your marketing your products. This means you must also invest in creating a marketing campaign. It can cost you lots of time and money to create one that drives traffic to your store page.
3. Maintenance
Amazon, again, is one step ahead in this aspect. After you post your products on the store page on Amazon, you only need to wait for someone to buy them. This is because Amazon takes care of the website’s maintenance.
When you’re using Shopify for your website, though, it’s harder to maintain a store. This is because you need to do it yourself. Managing a store means that you need to set the prices, answer to customers, and track the deliveries as they make their way to the customer.
Not only do you have to manage the store, but you also have to build it, too. This means you need to have some coding knowledge to build your store and fix any bugs.
Of course, you can hire others to do this for you, but it will mean investing more of your money into this. When choosing to sell on Amazon vs Shopify, consider this and the time you have on your hands.
4. Fulfillment
If you’re opening an online store, then you must have a way to deliver products to your customers. This is where fulfillment services come into play. These services will deliver the products for you, leaving you with fewer things to deal with.
Amazon has a program called Fulfillment by Amazon, or FBA for short. This service handles everything involved in fulfillment. This means Amazon is in charge of product storage, packaging, and shipping.
The only thing you need to do is ensure that your products are in Amazon warehouses. This also makes it possible for them to deliver to customers on the same day. If a warehouse closer to the customer’s location has the order in stock, Amazon will contact the warehouse and have them ship the item to the customer for faster deliveries.
Shopify doesn’t have a fulfillment service yet but promises to build one that rivals FBA. In the meantime, Shopify Amazon fulfillment is the best way to have a fulfillment service under Shopify. This can cost a bit more, but it’s a way to bring products to your customers with no issue.
5. Ownership
When we’re talking ownership, we’re talking about the traffic and customers you have. When it comes to choosing between Amazon vs Shopify, ownership can mean a lot for your business.
Under Amazon, you own nothing. Everything from the traffic to the customers is under the ownership of Amazon. This also includes the page where you’re posting your products.
This means that if there’s something that Amazon doesn’t like about your product/page, they can take away you selling privileges in the blink of an eye. You must play by their rules to don’t want to lose access to their customers.
Shopify has you doing more, but at least own everything that you’re working on. Your customers, products, and store are all yours. You can do what you want without fear of losing sales privileges.
6. Competition
Choosing between Shopify vs Amazon can come down to the competition you will face. Under Amazon, you will have millions of businesses to go up against. What’s worse is that you can’t do much to stand out since you have no control over marketing there.
With Shopify, there isn’t much competition once you get the customer to your website. You even have control over how you market your products to attract more customers.
Choose Between Amazon vs Shopify Today
If you want to help your business survive, you need to go online. Choose between Amazon vs Shopify and get your business out there today!
Want to learn more about e-commerce? It’s not as simple as putting your products up for sale and hoping someone will buy them.
Check out our informative guides to learn how you can improve your chances of thriving in e-commerce platforms today!
