Diversification is something every seller should aim for. Amazon is very lucrative, but for risk management you don’t want to rely 100% on Amazon as your only sales channel. Ideally you want to have multiple sales channels, so in case 1 of them declines you will still have others to rely on. The easiest sales channel you can setup yourself is running your own webshop.

Top 3 reasons every Amazon Seller needs their own Online E-commerce Store

1. You don’t have to pay Amazon a 15% commission.
   This is a pretty obvious one, but this is major! Margins through your own store are immediately 15% higher than on Amazon!
2. You have full control over your customers & sales channel.
   This is a very important one. Your rankings on Amazon will always fluctuate. You might rank on page #1 right now for your Garlic Press. But maybe next year the competition has pushed you down to page #2 and you are barely doing sales anymore. But with your own store you will always be the only seller!
3. You can build an email list & create a customer base.
   Amazon does not allow you to email your customers for promotional purposes. This means that if you are launching a second product on Amazon, you can’t even email your previous customers to let them know you will be launching a second awesome product! But with your own webshop, you can create your own email list, over which you will have full control!

Most FBA sellers start with their own Shopify website, as it is very easy to set up & connect to your stock at the FBA warehouse.

1). Register Domain Name

If you haven’t already, you should start by registering your domain name for your webshop. The most obvious would be to just pick your brandname.com. If this domain is already registered, you can always pick something like brand name-store.com or brand name-online.com. I use namecheap.com to register my domains.

2). Setup Shopify Store

Setting up a Shopify store is pretty straightforward.

Register your Shopify Account here.

Shopify has a 14-day free trial. After that you, you pick one of their plans:

3). Connect the Domain with the Shopify Store

By default, your Shopify store’s URL will be brandname.myshopify.com. Of course, we want to use our own domain name.

Next, we click on “Connect existing domain”.

Here, we enter our own domain name for which we want to connect with Shopify.

Now, we need to log back in to our domain name provider. Here we have to change:

• A record should point to Shopify’s IP address, which is 23.227.38.32
• CNAME record should point to shops.myshopify.com

How this is done differs per domain provider. If you are having trouble with this I advice you to contact your domain provider or read Shopify’s help page.

Once that is done you will need to verify that everything is working, and you are all set.

If you are into dropshipping, you can also check out Shopify dropshipping tools such as: Oberlo vs Spocket

3). Connect Shopify to Amazon FBA

We have to ask ourselves: How are we going to ship the orders we receive through our Shopify store? Most of us are already using Amazon FBA, and I personally love it. So, I will connect my Shopify store with Amazon FBA. This way, each order from Shopify will be sent from my FBA stock.

1. Go to Settings > Shipping option:
   
2. Scroll down to Additional shipping methods & click on Add dropshipping service.
3. On the next page find Fulfillment by Amazon & click on Activate.
   
4. Login into your Amazon seller account & that’s it.
5. Now on your product page you can select Amazon Marketplace Web as your fulfillment service.

4). Import Amazon products to Shopify

Import products from Amazon. Of course, we can manually add all our Amazon products to our Shopify store. However, I am rather lazy, so I want to automatically import all my Amazon products into my Shopify store. There are a couple of ways to do this:

1. You can create a . CSV file from your Amazon inventory & import it in your Shopify Store:
2. Use one of Shopify’s 3rd party apps: I use this one which has the 7 day free trial.

5). Promote Shopify store

Ok, now that our Shopify store is up and running, we want to start with a promotion! People aren’t just randomly going to find your e-commerce store so are going to do some advertising:

Amazon

Amazon has very strict rules about directing Amazon customers to your own site: This is forbidden! However, you are allowed to have your website on your product packaging. So, I always make sure to add my Shopify URL to the back of the product packaging.

SEO

Traffic from Google will be our main source of visitors. We definitely want to be found if customers Google our brand name. But if we are selling Garlic Presses we also want to be found for the keyword: “Garlic Press” and other long tail keywords.

I have been in SEO since 2013 and used to do all SEO work myself. However, the last couple of years I noticed the world of SEO is changing so fast that you really have to be on top of your SEO game. So therefore I rather outsource all my SEO needs to a freelancer who does it full time. This way I can fully focus on my main strength: Selling on Amazon. And have a professional take care of the SEO side of the webshop.

SEO Service

I personally have tried a couple of different SEO services and ended up with TheHoth.com. So far I am pretty happy with their service, they have a clean dashboard and their quality backlinks are top notch. They offer a whole bunch of SEO services: content creation, guest posting, high-quality backlinks, reputation management, etc. We definitely don’t need all of these services. I only use them for the following:

• Contextual Backlinks: Google favours backlinks from websites with the same content. So, if I have my Garlic Press Shopify store, these backlinks will come from food-related blogs.

• High Authority backlinks: The powerhouse behind the backlinks strategy. Since my ecommerce store is brand new I want to give it some authority. This can be done with backlinks from other high-authority websites.

• Content creation: I also have a blog on the Shopify site. I want to have as much content on this blog about my products as possible. This is a great way to rank for long-tail keywords. For example, if someone searched for “stainless steel garlic press with silicone grip,” and I happen to have that keyword somewhere on my blog, it is very likely that my blog will show up for that long-tail keyword.