Brands ask this as a choice. It is usually not one — most successful product businesses sell on both and use each for what it is good at. The useful question is what each channel is for.
What Amazon gives you
Demand that already exists. People go to Amazon with intent to buy. You are not creating the demand, you are capturing it. This is the entire proposition and it is substantial.
Trust and logistics you did not build. Prime delivery, a returns process customers already understand, a payment flow they do not think about.
A floor under volume. For many categories Amazon is simply where a meaningful share of buyers look first.
What it takes
The customer is not yours. No email address, no purchase history you can act on, no relationship. You cannot build a second order through a flow because you cannot reach them.
Fees. Referral fee of roughly 15% in most categories, plus FBA fulfilment, plus storage, plus advertising that is increasingly mandatory to be visible.
Price competition on your own product. Including from resellers and sometimes from Amazon itself.
Platform risk. Account suspensions happen, appeals take weeks, and your revenue is zero in the meantime.
What your own store gives you
The customer relationship. Email, purchase history, the ability to build a second order. This is the whole case and it is also the whole difficulty.
Margin. Payment processing of around 2 to 3% instead of 15% plus fulfilment plus ads.
Brand. How the product is presented, what story surrounds it, what the unboxing is like. On Amazon you get a product listing in a standard template.
Control. Of pricing, of bundles, of subscription, of the data.
The economics, honestly
| Amazon | Own store | |
|---|---|---|
| Demand generation | Platform provides it | You pay for it |
| Take rate | ~15% plus FBA plus ads | ~2.5% plus your CAC |
| Customer data | None | Yours |
| Repeat purchase control | Minimal | Full |
| Fixed cost | Low | Platform, tooling, people |
| Risk | Account suspension | Rising ad costs |
Amazon's effective take rate after advertising lands between 30 and 40% of revenue for many sellers. Your own store's equivalent is whatever your CAC is as a share of revenue — which for a lot of DTC brands is in the same range or worse.
The difference is not that one is cheaper. It is that money spent acquiring a customer on your own store buys you the ability to sell to them again.
How we would think about it
If repeat purchase is strong — consumables, subscriptions, categories where people reorder — your own store is where the business is and Amazon is a top-of-funnel discovery channel. Price it so it does not undercut you, and accept the fee as a cost of acquisition.
If it is a one-off purchase with no realistic repeat — a tool, a piece of hardware — Amazon's demand is harder to replicate and the lack of customer relationship costs you less.
If you are early, Amazon can validate demand faster and cheaper than paid social. Just do not let it become the whole business before you have tried to own the relationship.
The brands that get this right use Amazon for the SKUs that are easy to ship and hard to differentiate, and keep the bundles, subscriptions and new launches exclusive to their own store. That gives people a reason to come direct.
Talk it through
Tell us your repeat rate and your Amazon share.
Those two numbers say whether you are building a brand with an Amazon channel or an Amazon business with a website.
Ask usA real read within one business day — not a sales call.
About the author
Manpreet Singh
Founder of Proscube. Leads the studio's Shopify, headless and CRO engineering, and works directly with founders rather than through account managers.
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