Is selling on Amazon any better than setting up your own eCommerce site?

It depends.

Read this thread for the run down on selling on amazon. It's about an info product, but a lot of Warriors give their perspective on selling on Amazon.

http://www.warriorforum.com/internet...t-clark-9.html

I do both - more eyes seeing your product gives you more opportunity to make the sale! Might as well include Ebay as well.

Use a shopping cart like Magento and you can automatically sync your stock to Amazon and Ebay while selling on your own site.

Amazon / Ebay - You are always open to account problems. A run of bad feedback can easily harm sales. New seller with a better position can harm sales. However you can get a huge number of people seeing your product.

Your site - Your at the whim of Google and their rankings! However if you rank well for your keywords you can do very nicely without having to give a percentage of each sale away.

Yeah, it can be incredibly expensive and time consuming driving traffic to your new ecommerce site (as well as developing it) unless you have a large customer base already. Whilst you'll probably have more gross profit on each sale through your own site, a higher net profit is questionable when you factor in the costs of bringing in traffic and maintaining your site on an ongoing basis.

As a few have already indicated, a multi-channel approach is becoming ever more popular both in terms of putting your wares in front of more people, but also to protect yourself from sudden account closures etc. which Amazon and eBay can impose at will. It's a case of 'putting all your eggs in the one basket'.

You should do both.

And sell on eBay,

With a website, you can build a site for repeat business. Once you have the customer email addresses (and at least 1/2 will opt in) you can email regular promotions to your email list.

Also, I find a fair amount of people will find our products on eBay and Amazon, then they order directly on our website.

I've been doing eCommerce for 11 years and the email list can be a cash machine if you work it correctly.

Depends what you want to do.

If you're planning to build your own chain of products, you want to be able to present and display them on your own website, where you control all the links and content, and it's yours - it looks MUCH more professional if you build your own site.

You want to ask yourself where you want to go as a marketer, and figure out what your goals are, preferably make a list.

I'm building a woocommere site and rebuilding it because of the issues i faced with the limited AWS Amazon Cloud Servers i initially allocated. The Goal is to build an alternate ecommerce store that automatically sync's products daily from the leading ecommerce websites.

Believe me, i learnt it the hard way that this is a very big task when it comes to the server esp. as a guy with no experience architecting or handling servers. Yet my vision to build the site was far above the problems encountered, so i did build the site wiifom.com which then went on to face a lot of overload issues as the product portfolio crossed 100. My goal was 1 Million+.

The guys i worked on fiverr to handle the servers were initially cooperative but then got slagging and slow to respond which also affected the site great a bit.

I then found a AWS Solutions Architect to design the servers for my requirement but also to keep the costs down. So he gave me a simple solution without a CDN, Cache, Read Replicas, Staging Servers without all of which in itself the monthly bill was totaling to around ~$700.

Now with the new servers installed and configured, i am now struck between the config. engineers in fiverr who also some time tend to be too egoistic acting as if they were the bosses telling me what to do and refusing to work if i didn't go by their suggestion.

As of date that i'm writing this reply, the site is down and hope to be upped on new servers in a day or two but suggest me a topic under which i could write a new thread sharing my experiences with the site, the problems and how i encounter them, my goals and how i reach them, how i bring traffic and how much sales the site makes, until we have a system that you all could replicate to establish large ecommerce affiliate sites without all these hassles that i'm currently going through.

Setting up an online store is much better than selling your products on Amazon because it gives you the flexibility to decide which products you want to sell and how would you sell them. Even you can decide who are your targeted customers are and how can satisfy them by providing them what they needs.

You should use all the tactics like own webstore, Amazon, Ebay, Etsy and any other available method to sell your product.

Well, lets think about it for a moment... Amazon has a crapload of traffic. Your eCommerce site will not even come close to that. All you have to do is sell your product for1 cent cheaper than the rest and your product shows up #1.

Plus, there are a few good items you can sell on Amazon that are very profitable and easy to acquire locally.

If you can get a lot of traffic going to your own site, it would be better to sell it on your own site. But most of the time it is difficult to get traffic to your own site so this is where selling on Amazon will help your products to sell faster. If you are looking to move your items quickly put them on Amazon.

I don't see it as an either/or situation. I have my own stores as well as selling on amazon. Amazon has the traffic and you can often make quick sales there, BUT you lose profit to fees and shipping costs and have to compete on pricing which can drive your profits down even more. You have limited control over the product pages since another 3rd party seller can change the listing page (I have had it happen more than once where a competitor completely changes the page I was listing on).

On your own stores, you have to work to drive traffic to them, but can control your profit margins far better. You have complete control over your pages and the information. You can also build up relationships with customers to drive repeat sales which is something you cannot do on Amazon since they don't let you send marketing materials or emails to customers.

So it's really a matter of short term sales (amazon or ebay) versus long term relationships with customers that you can do on your own stores. And which platform to use really comes down to your business model.

Those who want to say buy closeout merchandise or pallets of a certain product would probably do best on Amazon or other marketplace sites since you can get big traffic to that product, sell out of it and find another one. If you want to build a relationship with manufacturers, wholesalers, etc where you have a steady supply of products, you can do either but I think they are more suited to your own stores.