How Amazon Sellers Should Use Shopify To Strengthen Their Profits

This article was updated on August 31, 2023 in correspondence with Amazon's announcement of Buy with Prime integration for Shopify stores.

Whether you scale your online retail enterprise within a single market — like Amazon, for example — or into multiple channels, you should make business decisions with one goal in mind: maximizing profitability.

What’s one of the best ways to do that? Expand into Shopify.

This best-in-class ecommerce platform is one of the most effective, easy-to-use solutions that can connect your brand to the world outside Amazon. It also happens to be a great way to strengthen profits.

How can you use Shopify to boost your profitability? Let’s explore.

What Is Shopify?

Anchored by an intuitive, drag-and-drop web-builder, Shopify software lets merchants easily build and customize an online store. Sellers can use their store to sell products in multiple places, including the web, a brick-and-mortar location, in-person pop-up events, social media, online marketplaces, and more. 

While Amazon is an isolated — albeit huge — ecosystem that enables you to sell through its platform alongside other online sellers, Shopify is a specialized platform that gives you the tools you need to build your own online store.

Shopify has evolved into a one-stop solution for everything a retail business needs, using several technologies to ensure merchants can easily access and integrate multiple business tools.

Their own marketing advises sellers to, “Think of Shopify’s product as layers you can choose from to build the right stack for your business.”

Those layers, which can be boiled down to three buckets of products, define the Shopify ecosphere.

Layer 1: Shopify’s Core Product

The core product offers everything you need to start selling, including:

• Templates to design the look and feel of your store.
• Tools to sell in multiple places online and in-person.
• Integrated payment processing.
• The best-converting checkout on the internet.
• SEO and marketing tools.

Layer 2: Additional Products and Services

Shopify offers powerful upgrades to help you grow your business, such as easier access to capital and other products and services designed to help independent business owners gain a leg up in the market.

Layer 3: Apps Built By Trusted Partners

The Shopify App Store is filled with thousands of approved apps that work seamlessly with the core product to give you options for running your store. Want to build a custom solution? No problem. Access the marketplace of Shopify Experts for design help.

With all of these features — and many more — Shopify offers quick, easy ways to expand your online presence and the number of customers you’re able to reach.

Expand Your Presence, Expand Your Reach

Yes, millions of people shop on Amazon. But at the end of the day, Amazon is only one sandbox. It’s an isolated marketplace that people need to enter in order to shop.

Shopify, on the other hand, puts you on the world stage. It gives you a global presence with no restrictions and where you call the shots.

While Amazon serves more than 197 million people a month, Shopify boasts 57 million unique visitors per month. Some of these shoppers overlap, but with nearly one-third the traffic of Amazon, Shopify makes a compelling option for expanding your reach. There’s also something to be said for having a site that’s all yours and that you can customize to fit your brand. 

Another benefit? An important business principle that often gets overlooked:

Redundancy.

Amazon can be fickle, and there’s always the threat of a shutdown that could cause serious disruptions to your sales funnel. Shopify gives you the means to build strong redundancy into your operation to avoid these snafus.

RELATED: How Does Amazon’s Account Health Assurance Work - And Is There a Catch?

Plus, they make it easy for you to run your online shop, and they provide a number of other benefits, including:

• Simple set up and infrastructure.
• Multiple features that support a wide range of businesses.
• Inexpensive solutions and add-ons.
• Wide selection of customizable themes.
• Multichannel payment options with Shopify Point of Sale.
• Exposure on Shopify's Marketplace.

The decision to go with Shopify seems an obvious one. The question is: Which route do you take to get started?

Adding a Shopify Store To Your Online Empire

If you create a Shopify store alongside your Amazon storefront, you have two basic options:

1. Operate your Shopify and Amazon stores independently from one another.
2. Incorporate your Shopify store into your fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) operations to take advantage of their combined services.

Either way, you’re adding volume to your sales channel.

Going the FBA route allows you to simplify your logistics by storing and shipping items through Amazon’s extensive warehouse network.

Keeping your Shopify and Amazon stores separate, on the other hand, avoids certain drawbacks, such as:

• Amazon fees, including long-term storage.
• Lack of international order fulfillment through Amazon.
• Sole responsibility for all customer service.

RELATED: Amazon’s 2023 Fee Hikes Are Here! Can FBA Sellers Protect Their Profits?

Making your decision before launching your Shopify store is ideal, but if you discover later that you prefer one operational method over the other, you can switch at any time.

In fact, connecting your Shopify site to Amazon is well-charted territory, and plenty of tutorials exist to help. The Shopify App Store offers dozens of apps designed specifically for this purpose.

Whether you elect to have your Shopify store fly solo or you plug it into your FBA machine to streamline shipping and delivery, you’re choosing a winning solution. By expanding your online presence to include your very own storefront, you can create a much larger channel through which sales can flow.

NEW: Amazon "Buy with Prime" App for Shopify

On August 30, 2023, Amazon announced a new app integration that makes it easy for merchants to offer Buy with Prime on Shopify stores. Buy with Prime is an Amazon DTC offering that helps merchants grow their ecommerce businesses on their own websites. Leveraging Amazon’s fulfillment network, wallet, and the trusted experience of Prime, Buy with Prime has been shown to increase shopper conversion by 25% on average.

The Buy with Prime app for Shopify is natively integrated into Shopify’s Checkout and admin, which makes it easy for merchants to manage their Buy with Prime orders and transactions. Merchants can simply select the items they want to offer with Buy with Prime, and the app will automatically add the Buy with Prime button to the product pages. When a Prime member clicks on the Buy with Prime button, they will be taken to a checkout page where they can use their Amazon account to pay for their order.

The Buy with Prime app for Shopify is available to all U.S.-based Shopify merchants who are already using or want to use Amazon’s fulfillment network. The app is currently rolling out as an invite-only beta, but it will be available to all eligible merchants by the end of September.

Merchants who are interested in using the Buy with Prime app for Shopify can learn more and sign up for the beta at here.

Align Your Efforts To Maximize Profits

The average Shopify merchant in the United States makes about $72 of profit from each customer, according to folio3, with high-earning merchants making about $149 per client and low-earning merchants making about $44 per client.

These numbers mean that adding a Shopify storefront yields sellers an average of about $72,000 in profit for every thousand customers. Yes, that’s profit, not revenue.

To reap these benefits, align your sales efforts to each channel, while enabling them to work in concert with one another. Your advertising efforts, for example, should tie in directly with your expanded campaigns to drive off-Amazon traffic and increase profitability. Your Shopify storefront gives you a wider opportunity for promotion, so it’s important to make the most of that expanded audience.

RELATED: How Amazon Sellers Can Grow Off-Amazon Traffic To Increase Profitability