5 Big Differences Between Amazon and Shopify-Ebuysourcing Service

Amazon vs Shopify-Which is the best platform for your business?

EBUYSOURCING

03/30/2022

Amazon vs Shopify-Which is the best platform for your business?

When it comes to e-commerce, it is crucial to find a platform that suits your business best. No matter which platform you are considering, you need to break down its pros and cons and analyze each one to draw a firm conclusion.

As e-commerce giants, Amazon and Shopify are definitely two of the best online selling platforms for you to choose from.

Amazon vs Shopify- Overview

In a nutshell, Shopify is an e-commerce store platform that provides great convenience for people to set up e-commerce websites easily and efficiently. With its bulk of free, well-designed templates and thousands of apps aggregated, you can easily customize the interface and structure of your own website.

As for Amazon, it has reached a broad customer base composed of millions of customers all over the world. Compared to Shopify, Amazon doesn’t require you to build a website, instead, simply listing your products in its categories can do the trick, which offers a significant convenience because you don’t need to put a lot of effort into marketing for your website.

In this article, we will go through the main differences between Amazon and Shopify to help you determine the best platform for your business.

Amazon vs Shopify-Traffic and customer attraction

There is no doubt that Amazon has more traffic than Shopify. In 2021, around 197 million people visited Amazon per month, while 56.6 million people visited Shopify.

Even though both platforms seem to have a huge customer base, unlike Amazon’s huge investment in marketing to attract customers, merchants on Shopify have to count on themselves for marketing, as Shopify only provides support for running a website. As a result, the methods of attracting customers on both platforms vary greatly.

Shopify merchants mainly rely on Google, and because most people only view the first page of search results, merchants must compete for search rankings through a variety of strategies such as SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, and so on.It usually takes several months, or even a year, before you start to earn profits.

Compared to Shopify, selling on Amazon is relatively easy. Amazon will bring potential customers to your listings as long as the prices are reasonable and the quality is great.

In most cases, merchants on Amazon are able to earn money from the first week.

Amazon vs Shopify-Customer experience

Even though both Amazon and Shopify provide a variety of support resources, including phone, help pages, forums, email, and video tutorials, requesting a solution on Amazon can sometimes be a frustrating experience.

Due to the lack of authority, in some cases, Amazon customer service has to forward your request to another team, which takes up to 24 hours to respond by email. Besides that, the response might not be clear and specific, If things don’t go smoothly, you might get stuck for several days.

By comparison, Shopify offers top-tier support services for merchants. Thanks to its 24/7 phone service, whenever you need help, you can just give it a call.

Amazon vs Shopify-Competition

Amazon allows merchants to sell the same product, so merchants have to compete for the BuyBox that makes up most of the purchases, which leads to a ton of fierce competition. Not to mention that Amazon sells its own products in most of the popular categories.

In some categories, Amazon’s products even take up over half the purchases.

But things are different on Shopify. To sell your products, you need to set up a website, market on different channels, and hire a third-party logistics provider to fulfill the orders, which raises the threshold of selling on Shopify. The higher the threshold it requires, the lower the competition there will be.

Amazon vs Shopify-Control over your store

Selling on Amazon is like renting some shelf space in a supermarket. With Amazon’s strict rules, you must be prepared to take the risk of having your products suspended from time to time. Feedbacks and reviews from customers also have a big influence on your sales. Furthermore, you have limited options to design the layout of your store.

In contrast, Shopify makes sure everything is under your control. Although there are a great number of templates, you can fully customize the storefront. What’s more, as you have complete ownership of your store and brand, you are free of all those risks of selling on Amazon.

Amazon vs Shopify-Fulfillment methods

As you might already know, FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) is the key to making Amazon stand out from its competitors. It offers great convenience for handling the whole fulfillment process, including storing your goods, picking and sorting them, shipping them, dealing with returns, etc. So merchants can concentrate on their products.

Shopify doesn’t provide similar fulfillment methods, which means you have to spend lots of time and effort finding a reliable logistics provider. Besides that, a professional customer service team is vital for your business once it has grown to a certain scale.