Amazon plus DTC: the complete guide

Decide what each side of the business is for, in writing, before you argue about where a product or a budget should go. The roles are genuinely different and trying to make both do everything produces a thin version of each.

The marketplace is a demand capture machine. People arrive there with the intention to buy something in a category, they compare a handful of options, and they choose one. Your job on that side is to be one of the options they see and to be the easy choice: right price band, good images, complete attributes, fast delivery, enough reviews to remove doubt. What you do not get is a relationship. The buyer belongs to the marketplace.

Your own store is a relationship machine. You have to bring the visitor yourself, through search, ads, email or word of mouth, and that costs money. In return you control the whole experience, you can sell a set instead of a single item, you can add a subscription, and you keep the customer so the second and third orders cost you almost nothing.

That split suggests where each should be strongest. The marketplace is where a first time buyer of a well understood product finds you. Your store is where a buyer who already knows you comes back, and where anything that needs explanation, configuration or a bundle belongs.

Write this down alongside the share of revenue each side produces now. Then be honest about your dependence. A brand where the marketplace produces the large majority of revenue is a brand with a single point of failure, because an account issue there stops the business. That is a reason to grow the direct side, not a reason to pretend the marketplace does not matter.

Work out what one unit actually leaves you with on each side, using your own fees and costs, before deciding where growth should come from. The comparison is rarely what people assume, and it changes by product.

On the marketplace side, start with the selling price and subtract the cost of goods, the referral commission, the fulfilment fee if the marketplace ships for you, storage charges including any long term storage penalties, the cost of returns and unsellable returned stock, and the advertising cost per unit sold on that channel. Add any monthly seller account cost, spread across units.

On the direct side, start with the same selling price and subtract cost of goods, payment processing, pick and pack, the shipping you absorb, platform and app subscriptions spread across orders, and your acquisition cost per order from advertising and any other paid traffic.

Then compare like with like. Say a product sells for the same price on both. On the marketplace you might be paying commission and fulfilment but almost nothing to acquire the shopper. Directly, you pay no commission but you pay for the visitor. Which comes out ahead depends on your commission rate, your product's size and weight, and how expensive your traffic is. Run it per product, because a small light item and a large heavy one can land on opposite sides.

Then add the part that only exists on one side. A direct order can produce a second order. Apply a conservative repeat rate and you will often find the direct order is worth more than the first transaction suggests, which is what justifies spending more to get it.

Update the model when fees change, when your ad costs move, and when you change fulfilment. Decisions made on last year's arithmetic are the most common reason a brand keeps pushing the side that stopped paying.

Decide which products lead on each side rather than mirroring the full range in both places. A deliberate split gives shoppers a reason to be where they are and stops the two sides eating each other's margin.

Send to the marketplace the products that win a comparison quickly: single items, well understood categories, sizes that ship cheaply, strong images, and enough stock depth to hold position. These are the products people search for by type rather than by brand, which is exactly the demand the marketplace has.

Keep for your own store the things a listing format handles badly. Bundles and sets, subscriptions and replenishment, personalised or made to order items, new releases you want to control the launch of, and anything where the buying decision needs more explanation than a listing gives you room for.

Multipacks and set sizes are the practical middle ground. The same product in a different configuration exists legitimately in both places without being the identical item, which reduces direct price comparison and lets each side have something the other does not. It also raises order value on whichever side you place the larger pack.

Watch what the marketplace does to your best margin products. Items with thin margin can become unprofitable once commission and fulfilment are applied, and they are often the ones that sell best there because they are cheap. Check contribution per product on that side regularly and be willing to remove items that lose money at volume.

Finally, plan the launch order. Launching a new product on your own store first lets you collect reviews, fix the description based on real questions, and work out the objections before you put it in a market where a poor start is hard to recover from. Then move it across with the content that already worked.

The listing and your product page are read by people in different states of mind, so writing one and pasting it into the other wastes both. Plan for two versions of the same facts.

A marketplace listing is read by someone comparing several similar products in a scannable format. The title has to carry brand, product, and the attributes people search and filter by. The bullet points have to answer the top objections in the order they arise, in short lines that survive being skimmed. The images have to do most of the persuading, because that is what people look at. The structured attributes have to be complete, because filters decide whether you appear at all.

Your product page is read by someone who arrived from your ad, your email or a search for you. They already have some context, and you have room and control. That page can tell the story, show the range, explain the difference between variants, present the bundle, offer the subscription, and answer questions at length. It can also carry the delivery promise and the return terms in your own words.

Both need the same underlying facts, so keep one internal source of product truth: dimensions, materials, compatibility, care instructions, what is in the box. When a customer question reveals a gap, fix it in the source and push it to both.

Use each side's research on the other. The questions asked on your listing tell you what to add to your page. The support emails from your own customers tell you which bullet point to rewrite. Reviews on both sides are the cheapest product research you will get.

If your brand is registered with the marketplace, use the richer content formats that unlocks. They are usually the only place on that side where you can show a brand story, compare your own products against each other, and use lifestyle photography properly.

Accept that a marketplace order gives you revenue and not a customer, and build the plan around that rather than around wishing it were different. It is the single most important structural difference between the two sides.

On your own store you get an email address, marketing consent where the shopper gives it, the full order history, and the ability to run a welcome sequence, a post purchase flow, a replenishment reminder and a win back. That is what makes the direct side compound: this year's customers reduce next year's acquisition cost.

On the marketplace you generally get the order, a shipping address, and a restricted messaging route intended for service about that order. You cannot add the buyer to your list, and marketing to them outside the channel's own tools is not permitted. So marketplace revenue behaves like a stream of first orders, and your acquisition maths on that side has to work on the first order alone unless the product has a genuine subscription option there.

This has a direct consequence for spending. You can afford to pay more for a direct customer than for a marketplace sale of the same product, because you will get a second order from one and probably not from the other. Many brands do the opposite, spending freely inside the marketplace and cautiously on their own site, and then wonder why the direct business never grows.

It also affects what you build. On the marketplace, invest in the things that improve first order conversion: images, reviews, delivery speed, price position, attribute completeness. On your own store, invest in the second order: the flows, the subscription option, the bundle, the reason to come back.

Finally, keep your own customer list well maintained. It is the asset the marketplace cannot take away, and it is what keeps the business alive if that account is ever interrupted.

There are legitimate ways to build a relationship with someone who bought from your marketplace listing, and there are ways that put your selling account at risk. Know the difference before you print anything.

What is generally not allowed is using the marketplace's own order to divert the customer away from it. Package inserts that direct buyers to your website to purchase, messages asking for a positive review, incentives offered in exchange for reviews, and content that tries to move the transaction off the platform all fall foul of the rules on most marketplaces. The penalty can be listing removal or account suspension, which is a heavy price for a small gain.

What is usually fine is content that serves the customer and happens to carry your brand. Clear instructions for using the product. A care guide. A warranty or product registration process, where one genuinely exists. Support contact details. A recipe card, a fitting guide, a maintenance schedule: things a buyer wants and that make your brand a name rather than a listing. Check the current rules on the channel you sell on, because they are specific and they change.

Outside the order, you are free. Your own advertising, your organic social, your search presence, your email list and your packaging on direct orders can all promote your store as much as you like. Building brand demand outside the marketplace is the sustainable route: people who search for your name are people you can meet on your own site.

Some marketplaces run programmes that reward external traffic sent to their listings, effectively reducing what you pay on those sales. If your channel offers one, it is worth understanding, because it changes whether a click from your own advertising is better spent on a listing or on your own page.

The honest summary is that you convert marketplace buyers into your customers slowly, through brand, not quickly, through inserts.

Decide the advertising split from what each type of spend produces, and review it on a schedule. Most brands drift into an unbalanced split by habit and then defend it after the fact.

Spend inside the marketplace buys position at the point of choice. It converts well because the audience is already shopping, and it is largely self contained: you can see the spend and the sales in one place. Its limit is that it buys a transaction, not a customer, and it stacks on top of the commission you already pay.

Spend outside buys attention and traffic you can direct. Search advertising on your brand and category terms, paid social, and any organic investment in search and content all fall here. It is harder to attribute and slower to pay back, and it is the only spend that builds an audience you keep.

A workable way to divide it is by job. Protect and defend your existing marketplace position with enough in channel spend to hold the products that matter, then treat additional budget as growth money and ask which side it grows. If your direct contribution per order is higher and you have flows in place to produce second orders, growth money usually belongs on the direct side.

Be careful about judging the two on the same measure. In channel advertising usually reports an attractive return because it is measured close to the sale. Outside advertising often looks worse in its own report while lifting sales in both places. Compare them on total business efficiency rather than on each platform's own figure.

Test by turning things off, not just by turning things on. Reducing in channel spend on a set of products for a period, and watching what happens to total sales for those products across both sides, tells you how much of that spend was buying sales you would have had anyway.

Brand searches are where the two sides collide, so make a deliberate decision about where those shoppers should land instead of leaving it to chance. Someone typing your name is your most valuable searcher, and they are worth the most on the side where you keep them.

Start on general search engines. Your own site should be the first result for your brand, and if paid competitors or resellers are bidding on your name, decide whether defending that with your own brand campaign is worth it. Also check what comes up alongside: marketplace listings for your products often rank on brand searches, and every one of those is a customer arriving somewhere you pay commission.

Then look inside the marketplace. Shoppers searching your brand there can be shown other sellers' products in the results and in sponsored positions on your own listings. Registering your brand with the channel usually gives you tools to protect your listings and to occupy more of that page yourself. Whether to spend defending your own brand terms in the marketplace is a judgement about how much of that traffic would otherwise go to a competing product.

Make your own site the better destination for brand searchers. It should carry the full range, the bundles, the subscription, the story, and any benefit that only exists there, such as a loyalty scheme or a longer warranty. If someone who knows your brand lands on your site and sees exactly what they would see on a listing, at the same price, with slower delivery, they have no reason to buy from you directly.

Finally, look at your delivery promise. Delivery speed is a common reason brand searchers choose a listing over the brand's own site. If your direct shipping is much slower, that is a fixable commercial problem and it may be doing more damage to your direct business than any marketing gap.

Manage inventory as one pool with allocation rules, because the alternative is two teams competing for the same units and both running out at the worst moment.

The practical difficulty is that stock sent into a marketplace fulfilment network is not easily available for direct orders. Once it is there, pulling it back costs time and money. So the allocation decision happens weeks before demand, which means it has to be based on a forecast rather than on what is selling today.

Build the forecast per side and per product. Look at the rate of sale on each, the lead time to replenish the marketplace network, and any seasonal pattern. Then decide the split with a deliberate buffer on the side where running out is most damaging. On a marketplace, going out of stock usually costs you ranking and momentum that take weeks to rebuild, so protecting that position often justifies holding more there than the immediate sales rate suggests.

Decide your fulfilment approach for direct orders separately. Some brands ship direct orders from their own warehouse, some use a third party, and some use the marketplace's own fulfilment service to ship orders from their website where that is offered. Each has a different cost and a different delivery promise, and the delivery promise is what your direct conversion rate depends on.

Watch the storage costs. Marketplace fulfilment networks generally charge more for stock that sits, and long term storage charges can turn a slow selling product into a loss. Review aged inventory on a schedule and remove or discount what is not moving before it costs more than it is worth.

Finally, connect stock to advertising on both sides. Advertising a product you cannot ship wastes spend and, on a marketplace, running out while advertising is running is a fast way to lose both money and position.

Judge the business on combined numbers, because a shopper often meets you on one side and buys on the other, and each platform will report that sale as its own. Managing the two from separate reports leads to decisions that help one side and cost the business.

Build a small set of combined measures. Total revenue and total contribution across both sides. Total marketing spend, including in channel advertising, outside advertising and any agency or tooling cost, expressed against total revenue. Unit volume by product across both sides, which shows you what is really selling regardless of where. And the share of revenue that comes from customers you can contact, which is the number that tells you whether the business is becoming more or less dependent.

Then watch the interactions. A brand campaign on general search often lifts marketplace sales, because people who hear about you go where they already have an account. A marketplace presence often lifts direct sales, because buyers who liked the product later search for the brand. Neither effect will appear in the platform reports, and both are real.

Use deliberate tests for the big questions. Pausing outside advertising in one region for a period and watching total sales across both sides is uncomfortable and informative. So is reducing in channel spend on a group of products. Structure these as time bound tests with a written expectation, not as permanent cuts made to save money.

Set a monthly review that looks at both sides in one meeting, with one person presenting the combined picture. Separate reviews create separate strategies, and separate strategies are how brands end up bidding against themselves.

Finally, decide what the mix should be a year out and check progress against it quarterly. Whether you want the direct side to grow or the marketplace to carry more volume is a legitimate business choice. Drifting into a mix nobody chose is not.