Search Engines & eCommerce Frank Ross on 13 Apr 2007 07:40 pm
Amazon Webstore Versus eBay Store
While Amazon has never really mastered the online auction market as eBay has, they have mastered the fixed price market in a way that eBay obviously has not. eBay still does not appear to know exactly what they want to do with their stores even though they have been online since around 2001. Remember the ‘reset the marketplace’ debacle last year? And there is buzz that eBay is getting to ‘reset the marketplace’ yet again.
If you’re looking for an alternative to eBay stores, consider an Amazon Webstore. Like eBay stores, Amazon Webstores are ‘connected’ to Amazon, but you don’t get any traffic from Amazon. The ‘connection’ is a link from your Seller Marketplace store. That will get you indexed by the search engine spiders but not much else. That part is pretty similar to eBay stores where you get a built-in link on your user page to your store. Few people click on it, but the search engines will crawl it.
The big difference in the Amazon Webstores is that you use your own URL and it’s not a sub-domain off the main URL like eBay is. So for example, if your store is “FauxFloralArrangements”, it would look like this on eBay:
http://stores.ebay.com/fauxfloralarrangements
However it would look like this as an Amazon Webstore:
http://www.fauxfloralarrangements.com
(assuming of course, you have secured the domain name).
That’s a huge difference from the perspective of change management. If you decided to move on to another platform, all the links you’ve built with an eBay store will go away. But with the Amazon Webstore, you supply and keep the domain. That means you can take it with you if you decide you don’t want to be an Amazon Webstore any longer and your links will follow (unless you’ve done deep linking).
Some other factoids about Amazon Webstores. Amazon acts as the shopping cart for your transactions just as eBay does. Amazon charges 7% which covers the whole transaction. eBay charges 10% of the first 25 dollars and 7% after that. But then you must also add in the PayPal transaction for another 3 percent. Amazon basic monthly hosting fee is flat: $60.00. So it’s more on the monthly hosting side, but has cost savings on the transaction side.
Another plus side to Amazon Webstores is that you can use your Amazon affiliate account there. In other words, you can setup things in your Amazon Webstore that you are just promoting as an affiliate and they show right along with your other ‘inventory’.
A down side is that there is no apparent way to promote your Amazon Webstore from other Amazon venues like the Seller Marketplace. My rep tells me that may be planned for the future, but for now, you have to get your traffic by other means. But there are indeed other means - like Pay Per Action for example.
You can read about Amazon Webstores at their page (link here).
Tags: Amazon Webstore, eBay Store, Selling on Amazon, Selling on eBay
on 15 Apr 2007 at 2:50 pm 1.Mel said …
Hi Frank,
Probably a dumb question about the Amazon store. If you already have the domain name operating with another website you will have to shut down that website and transfer the domain name to Amazon to make this work correct? Thanks
on 16 Apr 2007 at 10:36 pm 2.Frank Ross said …
Mel, you would indeed have to discontinue the operating website and transfer the domain. Amazon acts as the web host and the payment processor in that arrangement.