Shopify vs. Amazon

Shopify versus Amazon For Your Small Business

You have an amazing business idea and now you’re ready for the next step. Ecommerce is trending and your next focus is providing your small business with the best platform possible. In this article, we will discuss the differences between Amazon and Shopify and how your small business can even combine the two!

The Main Benefits of Amazon and Shopify

For the past couple of years, Amazon and Shopify have become top competitors in ecommerce. While they may target similar audiences, both carry pretty different specialties. Let’s discuss the main focuses of each platform and how that impacts you and your products.

AMAZON

When people say that Amazon is taking over the world, they may not be far from the truth. With 150 million unique visitors monthly in the US alone, site traffic may be Amazon’s greatest asset. The greatest benefits to using Amazon are reaching customers, convenience, and getting your products seen:

  • Hundreds of millions of customers: Site traffic gives your product great exposure.
  • Fulfillment: Letting Amazon do the heavy lifting. Through fulfillment on Amazon, your products are picked, packed, and shipped for you. They also take care of customer service and returns for your business so you don’t have to. You can just focus on growing your business.
  • Advertising: Getting your product seen by more. To increase your reach and drive sales, you can advertise your products on Amazon. Key-word targeted ads will appear in very visible places to create more traffic towards your product. You only need to pay if your ad is clicked!

In addition to being a household name, Amazon really just takes care of your product. You pay a fee, sell your product on the site, and have Amazon take care of the rest.

SHOPIFY

Shopify partners with you to build your online business. Its focus? Start, sell, market, and manage. Through a single platform, you have access to all the logistical and market-worthy details of your small business:

  • Start your Business: To move from ambition to action, Shopify helps to build your brand by giving website resources. After creating a custom web address, you are provided with free stock photos to amplify your brand. Through your newly customized online store, you can sell anything, anywhere, at any time.
  • Sell Anywhere: The option to sell online and/or in-person provides a great advantage for your business. After creating your own brand and website, Shopify provides secure checkout and processing for all purchases. With an easily accessible site, you can sell anywhere in the world. Additionally, you can promote and sell on Shopify through many sales channels. This can be done through your social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram) or other selling sites (Amazon, Ebay) to gain maximum exposure.
  • Market your Business: Finding the right audience to sell to is essential to building a good customer base. Through SEO tools for Shopify you can optimize keywords to gain organic search traffic. Campaign tools allow you to promote your product and reach audiences. These campaigns also come with reports to improve your efforts over time. Through SEO tools and analytical data, Shopify assists your business in marketing.
  • Manage your Business: Shopify’s dashboards allow you to manage your business from anywhere and accept and process most payment methods. In addition to insights and assistance, orders are fulfilled easily and quickly, especially through their new fulfillment network launch that allows 99% of businesses to offer 2-day shipping.

In addition to being fast and convenient, Shopify is reliable. 80% of its clients are online retailers, and it powers over 820,000 merchants across the world. Their recent fulfillment network launch shows the changes that are being implemented to better the user experience. Slowly and steadily, we are seeing a myriad of new advances that are pushing Shopify forward.  

The Major Differences Between Amazon and Shopify

Comparing Amazon and Shopify, as the same type of platform, may be the wrong move. While both help your small business to sell that may be where the similarity ends. Both platforms cover different things. While Amazon is an online marketplace, Shopify is a specialized ecommerce platform. With Amazon, you gain access to a slot on their site, but with Shopify, you gain your own site to manage.

While millions of people come to Amazon to buy things, they are not necessarily there to buy your product. In addition to you, there are millions of other businesses competing for the customer. There may be more access points on Amazon, but there may be a cheaper or better product located right next to yours. It is harder to stand out on Amazon, but this platform stands out in its convenience, speed, and accessibility.

People come to your Shopify site to buy your product, but the potential traffic will be smaller as these people will come through online search or other social platforms. There is much more work to be done on Shopify, but as a result, you can create a unique site with your own branding. Through tactics like SEO techniques and social media marketing, you can choose your audience and gain more loyal and consistent customers.

Integrating the Two Platforms Together

Because Amazon and Shopify are so different, they can work well together. Each carries something that the other site may not have. Their benefits can be combined to create an ideal pairing for your small business. So what should we integrate, and how?

  1. Create a Shopify site and an Amazon Seller account.
  2. Add the Amazon Sales Channel to your Shopify account. And that’s it! You can now sync inventory and product details and create Amazon listings directly from Shopify.
  3. Use SEO for organic traffic. The more site traffic, the higher the conversion rate. Using intentional keywords to target your audience allows you to choose your customer. This can be done through Shopify tools and marketing SEO specialists (such as electrIQ!)
  4. Grow your social media presence. Your goal is to create as many access points as possible. Creating site traffic through various social media accounts creates a loyal customer base.

Conclusion

While Amazon and Shopify both come with fees, combining these two platforms may become a worthy investment. Their differences hint at compatibility.

Combining the two allows you to grow your customer base and reach people you wouldn’t be able to if you only use one. Both bring different attributes to the table. Your small business can utilize their unique benefits to create a complete online presence that fosters a loyal and growing customer base.

Want to create a Shopify site? Start here.

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