You Don’t Own Your Amazon Customer. Amazon Does.

Let that sink in for a second.

You shipped the product. You handled the return. You funded the advertising. You dealt with the negative review at 11pm on a Friday.

And at the end of all that, Amazon kept the email address.

That’s the deal you agreed to when you listed on their platform. And for a while, it made sense. The traffic was there, the trust was built-in, and the volume was real. You didn’t have to build an audience from scratch. You just showed up where the buyers already were.

But the platform you signed up for in 2018 is not the platform you’re selling on today.

The math has quietly shifted against you.

Referral fees that started at 8% are creeping toward 15% in competitive categories. FBA costs have gone up. Amazon’s own private label products are sitting on the same page as yours. Advertising spend — which used to be optional — is now the price of visibility. And returns? Amazon’s return policy is generous to buyers and the cost lands on you.

Run the real numbers on a mid-tier product. Gross revenue looks fine. Then subtract the referral fee, the FBA fee, the ad spend to stay on page one, the cost of returns, and the storage fees. What’s left isn’t always what you thought you were building toward.

A lot of sellers are generating impressive gross revenue and thin net margins. At the same time, Amazon is building a complete picture of their customers — purchase history, browsing behavior, lifetime value — and using it to decide what to recommend next. That recommendation might be your product. Or it might be the Amazon Basics version that just launched last quarter.

Walmart isn’t the rescue plan.

When the Amazon numbers start to look uncomfortable, the natural instinct is to diversify onto Walmart Marketplace. And there’s a case for being there — it’s a real channel with real volume, and the advertising costs are often lower than Amazon’s because the platform is less mature.

But swapping one marketplace dependency for two isn’t a strategy. The commission structure is similar. The analytics are significantly worse — Walmart’s seller data tools are years behind Amazon’s. And the buyer profile on Walmart.com skews strongly toward price-first shoppers, which means your margin gets compressed from a different direction.

Running hard on both Amazon and Walmart while your own website sits neglected is a common pattern. It’s also a fragile one. When either platform changes its algorithm, adjusts its fee structure, or decides your category is one they want to own — and they will — you have no fallback.

The brands figuring this out are building something alongside the marketplaces.

Not abandoning them. The traffic on Amazon is real and walking away from it overnight is not a serious plan. But the brands gaining ground right now are treating Amazon as a discovery channel and their own website as the relationship.

The distinction matters. Amazon is where someone finds you for the first time. Your site is where they come back. Your site is where you know their name, have their email, can show them what’s new, and can offer them something a marketplace never could — a reason to be loyal to a brand instead of a platform.

That shift requires real infrastructure.

A Shopify storefront that actually converts — not just exists. A Google Shopping feed that’s clean and properly segmented so you’re not bidding the same on high-margin products as low-margin ones. Meta campaigns that build audiences you own instead of renting attention you can’t keep. Email flows that generate revenue on autopilot — welcome series, abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase sequences, win-back campaigns. And someone who can read the contribution margin clearly enough to know which channels are working and which ones just look like they’re working.

Most companies know they need to do this. Few have done it.

The obstacle is usually one of two things. Either the internal team is stretched managing the day-to-day of the marketplace accounts and doesn’t have bandwidth to build something new. Or they’ve tried to hand it to an agency, and the agency delivered a retainer agreement and a strategy deck but not a functioning DTC channel.

What actually moves the needle is someone who has done this before. Someone who has audited a product catalog and classified it by margin and DTC potential. Who has built the Google Shopping campaign architecture from scratch, written the weekly optimization SOP, set the ROAS floors, and made the budget reallocation decisions when the data supported it. Who has set up Klaviyo flows that capture buyers from day one and keep them coming back. Who has stood in a leadership meeting and presented a monthly P&L with the contribution margin broken out by channel — not just the revenue number that makes everyone feel good.

That kind of operator exists. They’re not always easy to find, but they’re the difference between a DTC channel that grows and one that technically exists.

The conversation more brands need to have.

If your business is generating meaningful revenue through Amazon or Walmart and you know the dependency is a risk — the conversation isn’t complicated. It’s: what would it take to build something we own? What does the DTC channel need to look like to carry real weight? What’s the 12-month plan and what does it cost to execute it?

Those are answerable questions. The path from marketplace-dependent to channel-independent is documented. Other brands have walked it. The ones that started two years ago are in a very different position today than the ones still waiting.

Whether you need someone to lead this full time, build the playbook and hand it off to your existing team, or come in as a consultant to audit what you have and tell you honestly what it would take — that’s the kind of work I do.

Not a pitch. A conversation.

If you’re a brand asking these questions, reach out. I’ve helped brands build the DTC infrastructure that makes marketplaces optional instead of mandatory — and I’m happy to talk through what that looks like for your business specifically.

Please send a message to mcanallyjim@gmail.com and lets chat.