The Pros
That High Traffic is Tempting!
It is indeed! We work with a number of companies that have literally built their business on Amazon or eBay. It’s great, they’ve built such a reputation on those sites that they’re top of their categories and selling products without really doing much more. That means they have time to come up with new products and listen to their customers. Amazon has nearly 184,000,000 visitors A MONTH. Could you imagine that sort of traffic on your own website?
Trust
With your own website, it’s hard to build trust, especially for new businesses. One of the biggest benefits of running a proper social media campaign is the level of trust it can build with your audience. But with platforms like Amazon and eBaby, customers have that trust right away. We’ve helped Amazon best sellers to move over to their own websites and it’s taken a long time to get people to start ordering regularly. That barrier just isn’t there with people who shop on Amazon and eBay.
New Customers
Sometimes with these marketplaces, especially Amazon, it almost seems too easy to acquire new customers. The moment your products start climbing up the ranks and getting to best seller status in their categories, your sales can go through the roof. Many people of have never heard of your brand are buying your products! But what next?
The Cons
Who are your customers?
This is probably the biggest problem, and it’s not even to do with social media. If you’re playing by the rules of Amazon, you can’t really contact your customers directly. You don’t get their email addresses, you don’t get to send them a follow up email with special offers, and you don’t get to retarget them with ads anywhere online…it’s all in Amazon’s hands. Wouldn’t you rather be able to connect properly with your customer?
Tracking
This is the big one for us! As Social Media Marketers, we like to know what people are doing when they see our ads. We also like to create audiences based on their actions, including purchases. Then, when we’re using Facebook, we like to let them optimise our campaigns to reach people who are more likely to take actions that we want them to…like purchase! Imagine spending £10,000 on a marketing campaign to your Amazon products. There is no genuine proof that it works. Sales could pick up drastically, but that could be down to Amazon and nothing to do with your campaign. When you have everything on your own website, you’re in control. If people aren’t doing what you want them to do, you can stop your campaign and adjust.
Knowing who your customers are and being able to offer them discounts as a thank you is priceless.
