Nowadays Amazon and Shopify are two giants in the e-commerce industry and they both can help you with Koongo to improve the performance of your business online.
Amazon has been an established marketplace for a very long while, Shopify started to offer its services more recently but it has already taken a wide share in the industry.

Amazon is a platform that allows merchants to sell a wide range of products on its website and provides extensive logistic support.
Shopify provides website space and all the support to make a website powerful for its clients.
Therefore both platforms help sellers to do business but in a different way. Because of this reason, they are not in strict competition between them. Actually, it is quite common to have merchants who build their websites using Shopify while they sell their goods on Amazon.

Differences between Amazon and Shopify

Hence, the first difference is that Amazon shows multiple companies to consumers, instead, Shopify shows just one company to consumers.

There is another difference.
Amazon uses its own website to host multiple brands therefore the sellers cannot personalize their space on Amazon. In this way, Amazon has millions of people who buy from its website. Each brand has the opportunity to increase its brand awareness and acquire new customers from other industries.
Instead, Shopify gives you your space and tools for your website that you can personalize as you wish. However, it is your duty to increase your customer base and brand awareness.

Amazon sells its own products in its marketplace so it is a competitor for its clients. A merchant that has his/her own website does not have this type of issue. So if you use Shopify, your clients will focus only on your products.

Order fulfillment

When you sell online the order fulfillment is one of the main aspects of your business.

Amazon Order Fulfillment

Amazon is surely the biggest online retailer in the world. It has been online for as much as nearly 30 years that is a huge time in the online industry. Amazon fulfills nearly 6 billion orders each year. Therefore Amazon could craft the fulfillment operations quite carefully to provide a service that could be successful and satisfactory.
Amazon is surely many steps ahead compared to its competitors about the fulfillment process. Those numbers can let you imagine how working with Amazon can be important for your business.

Shopify Order Fulfillment

Shopify is a more recent and very appreciated reality in the online industry. The Canadian company has recently decided to add the fulfillment option to its services.
The fulfillment by Shopify is available in the US only at the moment. Shopify has invested 1 billion dollars to develop its fulfillment network. The ambitious company claims its service will be faster and cheaper than its competitors. It is an important step that makes a serious threat, to the dominant Amazon position. This is good for the merchants because a wider choice is always a benefit in e-commerce. It will stimulate to find more appealing and performing solutions for the customers.

This is also good news for people who use Koongo. As both Amazon and Shopify have lots of orders to manage, Koongo can help the clients to have a better and easier experience.

Marketing traffic with Amazon and Shopify

Amazon

There are more than 350 million products to choose from on Amazon. Impressive. Due to the vastness of its nearly endless catalog, Amazon is a source of free traffic for its sellers. Although many sellers pay Amazon to push their products with ads.

Shopify

Shopify does not offer the opportunity of having free traffic but over 200 million people per year purchase from its stores. Each merchant needs to drive traffic to its store using Facebook, Google, or other sources of traffic.

You might think that it is a great opportunity to have free traffic from Amazon, which is true. However, there is a lot of competition and its platform is quite saturated. Shopify allows you to have the independency to target your audience. Koongo can help you when you use platforms like Google Shopping to advertise your products.

The Cost of Using Amazon and Shopify

Shopify Pricing

Shopify offers a trial period so you can use its platform for free for the first two weeks. Sometimes you can manage to have longer offers. This range of time is very good because you have the opportunity to set up your website without spending any money.

Amazon Pricing

You have two selling packages: Individual and Professional. You need to pay a fee per each item that you sell or a monthly fee depending on the package you choose. Also, you can have some referral and administration fees and you have extra costs for the FBA service.

Seller freedom

The autonomy in Amazon

Sellers do not work in full autonomy on Amazon because they are subject to its policies. Also, Amazon is a marketplace and, therefore, you cannot really customize it

The autonomy in Shopify

On the other hand, Shopify works differently. It gives you a store and, because of that, you can sell what you prefer. It is your website so you have full autonomy to personalize it as you wish.

Pros and Cons using Amazon and Shopify

Shopify advantages

• Easy setup: The setup is easy and user-friendly because the interface is quite intuitive.
• Unique store: You can have your personalized website using the wide selection of templates that Shopify has made available
• Simple integrations: You can integrate and customize your shop with an extensive range of apps to make it appealing for your customers.
• Mobile friendly: Shopify has several mobile-responsive solutions for both Android and iOS devices. 
• Customer support: Shopify assistance is available 24/7 so even if it is only based in Canada you will have customer support available for you.

Shopify disadvantages

• Pricing: You need to be very careful price-wise because you have a monthly fee, credit card fee, and transaction fee. Also, if you want to have some extra features you might have to pay for them.
• Setup process: The setup is not difficult but it is long and you might need to allow yourself some time to have everything.
• Unique: Shopify is unique so if you have experience with other platforms you will notice that it works differently.

Amazon advantages

• Customer base: Amazon has a customer base of million customers hence you do not have to work on the marketing funnel. You will use Amazon SEO to rank your products.
• Setup: Anybody can sell on Amazon as long as you follow its guidelines.
• FBA: Fulfillment by Amazon is a powerful way to sell.
• Trustworthy: Everybody knows amazon therefore a possible buyer will shop with confidence.

Amazon disadvantages

• Competition: You will face a lot of competition on Amazon. Also, if you sell on FBA, Amazon has your products so it can replicate them and become your competitor.
• Branding: You cannot customize your shop. There are lots of shops on Amazon and they all look the same.
• Customers’ list access: You do not have access to the customers’ list therefore you will not be able to do marketing activities with that.
• Pricing: Even Amazon has a lot of fees. Some basic ones, which are normal, and some other referral and admin fees. FBA has some extra fees to use its service. Also, Amazon chooses the price that it pays for your products on FBA.

What is the best choice for your business?

What is the best for your business, Amazon or Shopify? As you can see, the perfect solution does not exist because they both have pros and cons. We think they both are important for you. They are not in competition with each other and they can actually work well together. You can sell your products on Amazon on top of your Shopify store (that can be fully personalized and you can apply marketing solutions). The flexibility of a company like Shopify and its investments let us think that there will be pleasant surprises in the next future.

Koongo with Amazon and Shopify

The great thing is that Koongo can help you with both. We have many customers that use Koongo to coordinate the two giants of e-commerce. It is pretty simple to use Koongo and we make your life easier when you need to manage all your orders that come from all over the world.

Koongo is a product feed management tool so it can automate your data and order synchronization for online marketplaces like Amazon and/or e-commerce marketplaces like Shopify. Our product feed management tool can import your marketplace orders into your store every 15 minutes, which is extremely low, and automatically synchronizes your stock. In this way, you can process marketplace orders just like your Shopify ones.

Your store becomes a single integration point for your marketing activities. Koongo can help you sell and advertise your products on your favorite online marketplaces or selling channels.

Your product data changes will be automatically sent to all your connected channels. Koongo allows you to sell products low on stock in different places at the same time but you will always sell in-stock products In this way, you will increase your sales and conversions and you will be able to save some precious time for other business activities.

Koongo optimizes your product feeds and automates your product synchronization. It gives you a complete solution for product data management and all your marketing activities.

• You can use advanced filters to select just a group of products.
• The category mapping will help you to map your store.
• You can easily modify the prices of your products.
• There is a currency converter feature if you sell in different countries.

Apply for Koongo to help you with Amazon and Shopify

Koongo is very simple to use and it can help you with Amazon and Shopify. Moreover, it is very affordable as its starting price is as low as 19€ per month. You can update your subscription at any time according to your business needs.
There’s no risk associated because a 30 days Free Trial period is available.

For more details, you may contact us at support@koongo.com. We’ll be happy to help you with your Amazon and Shopify integrations.

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