Is Amazon Taking Your Customers?
You might be selling goods on Amazon but the one thing you’ll never have when you sell on Amazon is any kind of relationship with the customers who buy from you.
Given that building quality relationships with customers is at the heart of every business, this could be dangerous.. It is just as dangerous as having too much exposure to a big-box retailer if you sell in bricks and mortar.
A great business owner should aspire to build great relationships with their customers. They should aspire to growing lifetime customer value. After all, it is far easier and cheaper to continue to service the same customer over and over again rather than having to continually find new customers. Per Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
On Amazon, you never know if you have loyalty, because you never get ANY customer information. No name, no email, no phone number.
In short, there is no way to contact that customer again and offer them a repeat purchase opportunity, a deal, or to introduce a new service. Or even to simply survey them for their needs and wants.
Sure, you may be able to sell a container load of widgets through an Amazon listing, but who you sold it to was never your information and will never be passed along to you.
Your “success” is at the expense of knowing your customer. Customer knowledge is often what drives future sales.
Has your listing been hijacked on Amazon?
The issues with selling on Amazon are a whole lot worse than just not knowing your customer. The fact is Amazon has no brand loyalty to anyone but themselves. They are the world’s biggest market place and this is their business model. So you have to know this and weigh up the pros and cons.
They have all the analytics on your customers and your products, and they can do everything away at will. It’s not uncommon for listings to be hijacked and the ‘buy-button’ redirected to competitors or even by Amazon themselves. Yes, you read that right, Amazon is known to copy popular products and sell them in their AMAZON Basics line.
It’s the same reason UPS is cutting ties with Amazon, its biggest customer—because Amazon is aggressively building its own delivery network to replace third-party couriers like UPS and FedEx. With Amazon now delivering over 70% of its own packages and launching Amazon Shipping to compete directly, CEO Carol Tomé is wisely prioritizing UPS’s future over fueling a competitor.
In 2021, Reuters published an article where it had investigated a trove of internal AMAZON documents to
“…show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.”
In the US Courts the Federal Trade Commission has a case against AMAZON and a trial date has been set for October 2026 where Reuters report the FTC is:
“Accusing the online retailer of operating an illegal monopoly, in part by fighting efforts by sellers on its online marketplace to offer products more cheaply on other platforms.”
So, just to be clear, here are some of the things that Amazon can do:
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Sell your products for you, but keep all customer information.
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Charge a referral fee of up to 25% for each of their customers who purchase from you.
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Charge you extra to advertise on Amazon.
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Charge for warehousing, shipping and for fulfillment services.
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While allowing your competitors to hijack the ‘buy-button’ if they out-bid you or undercut your sales.
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Meanwhile, if Amazon Basics decides your product is successful enough, they will just replace your product with their own.
The Alternative?
If your business is more than just selling a volume of widgets, and you want to own the customer relationship and build your own successful Customer Commerce business, here are a few reasons why you should:
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You’ll have control over your brand
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You’ll make more profit
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You own the relationship and data
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You can have flexibility and ability to customize
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Free yourself from the algorithm
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Have a better relationship with your customer
Amazon is convenient and offers the potential to scale, but scale at the expense of lost relationships and a transactional business where you can’t control the communication, the price, or the terms just isn’t good for long-term business.
Owning your channel, and owning the relationship just makes good business sense. In a world where customer experience is king, owning the entire journey from start to finish gives you a powerful competitive edge.
Call StoreConnect and get a demonstration on just how easy it is to have your own Customer Commerce site built on the worlds number #1 CRM - Salesforce and with all the bells and whistles to manage the entire customer relationship.