When it comes to selling your own product online, people immediately think of selling on Amazon. It’s called FBA which means Fulfilled By Amazon and is a very popular way to start selling. However, others are convinced that starting their own e-commerce site is the better way to go. Although there is no right or wrong answer here, they do have differences that are important to understand.
Before you set out and spend money, it is essential to understand which system is going to work better for your needs. Each has its pros and cons and everybody has different needs which makes the choice a little unclear. In this article, we will go over what each system is like so you can decide for yourself which is going to work best.
Posting pictures
With both systems, it is very important to get the pictures right. You have to entice people to click and a big part of that is the visual aspect. How the pictures should look between doing FBA and your own e-commerce store is where the differences lie.
With FBA, it is a rule that you have to have no background in the picture. Many sellers ignore this rule but they end up penalized at some point. You have to take a good picture of the product and then use a background remover from Vista Create or another editor so there is only the product itself in the picture.
When you have your own e-commerce site, then you are able to post pictures in whichever way you see fit. If you think it’s helpful for the customer to see how it compares to other products then you can post them together. Or, to see how it looks in action then you can post it with the background.
This may seem like a minor detail, but it can be a source of frustration for FBA sellers to not be able to present the product in the way they would like.
Fulfillment
A major factor in how you should proceed will be the question of fulfillment. How will you get your product out to the customer? When it comes to FBA, you don’t have to worry about that at all. Amazon handles the picking, packing, and shipping for a fee. They are going to use their own shipping facilities with their own software running it and they have the system down to a T.
If you have your own e-commerce store then you have to be more in control of the fulfillment. When you are small you may be doing the packing and shipping yourself as orders come in. however, when you get bigger this is not going to be an option. You will have to find a fulfillment center to work with and have them handle the orders. Most people won’t have the resources to build their own warehouse and distribution center.
Traffic
Amazon has millions of people shopping there every day. You only need a small portion of these shoppers to find your product and buy it to become a massive success. If you have the right SEO practices then you will show up high in the rankings when people search for your product.
When you have an e-commerce store, you will have nobody on your site shopping since you have to build the traffic yourself. This involves having a blog on your site to attract organic traffic through SEO. you will also need to run paid ad campaigns on Google and social media to get targeted traffic to your product page. This can be expensive but you are more in control of who is shopping on your site and can make more money than with FBA potentially.
Customer service
When you run your own e-commerce store you have to treat it like an actual store. This means that you are responsible for customer service and will have to handle things like returns yourself.
When you run an FBA operation, Amazon handles everything from complaints to returns without you ever entering into the equation. It is less work, but you also have less control.
When you deal with customer service yourself you will have direct access to the needs of the customer and understand what their problems are unlike Amazon which doesn’t share that information. You can actually make your product or customer service better by handling these things yourself. Set up a chatbot to make your life easier and help your customers so you can focus on making the situation right when problems arise.
