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Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

Can't you open a normal online store that doesn't rely on Amazon? You could try shopify, or etsy, or sell on eBay? Or make your own?

Otherwise I feel it's a chicken and egg. It's like saying we need Amazon or a similar big known marketplace so that customers can find you and buy from you, but at the same time, we don't like the concentration of power it brings.

So if nobody tries to open an online store on their own anymore, what then?

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You can, but the fact that other large companies (like MonoPrice, and even newegg) sell alot of things on Amazon as well shows just much market Amazon controls.

One should likely have both, their own store, and an amazon store

I never go to Amazon to buy monoprice items. I go to monoprice and get guaranteed quality control over the items I will receive. If your products are compelling and your customer support is good I would prefer your own site vs going to Amazon.

While you dont, and I dont either we are not the only customers of Monoprice, and it seems monoprice gets enough sales from Amazon to justify having a store on that

The fact that we do not shop at Amzn for those items do not really change the reality of ecommerce in 2020

I agree 100%, and often use NewEgg and Monoprice for specific needs, but there's a huge swath of stuff where I check Amazon first just because they're always competitively priced and ubiquitous. Recently, there was an appliance accessory I needed that was only available from Amazon. Their position as the first place to buy online is crazy.

I've had to go to amazon several times to buy monoprice products since their website was just broken on multiple different occasions in the last year.

Platform traffic and discoverability. ECom volume lives or dies by traffic and Amazon has the bulk of it in Western markets. This is only going up as people take their product search directly to eCom vs. generic search (this BTW is also why Baidu began losing market power vs. Ali in China and Ali has also been a lot more innovative than Amazon in terms of attracting content creators on site)

Amazon's ads are 10x cheaper than Google/FB etc ads, that's why many brands remain amazon-only - they can't afford to advertise outside of it with their narrow margins.

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