Introduction
The Short Answer
If you own a Shopify brand and you have been seriously considering joining Amazon too, the short answer is—go for it!
Amazon is responsible for 37% of all US sales, so ignoring this fact will not protect your brand on Shopify; instead, you are handing the market to your competitors right as we speak.The brands that sell on Amazon treat the marketplace as a secondary acquisition channel instead of a threat, so doing this the right way and launching your Shopify brand on Amazon will add a revenue stream that will work for you even while you sleep
Why Shopify Brands Are Well-Positioned for Amazon and Where They Go Wrong
Most DTC (Direct-to-Consumer) founders underestimate how much of a head start they have, and they tend to make the same 4 mistakes.
Knowing these will help you skip the expensive learning curve, so let’s jump into it and take a look at them in detail.
The advantages you already have
Since you have already built a brand, you have already done the hard part, which matters more on Amazon than many people realize.
You have done a logo, product photography, a defined aesthetic, and a story, which is something most Amazon-native sellers don’t even have.
Now you can use all from the Amazon Brand Registry program, which gives you access to their A+ Content: the enhanced product description, a brand store, and sponsored brand ads, which generic resellers can’t run.
Since you already have the Shopify account, you are able to get the first-party data from there, which includes who buys, what they buy, what copy converts, and which objections often come in reviews, and none of that disappears when you open the Seller Central account.
This program gives you the benefit of creating your listing strategy, pricing, and PPC targeting from the day you join. You also are one step ahead because you have proof. These reviews are what make your brand legit on Amazon, and you can obtain them through the Amazon Vine program (Amazon’s invite-only reviewer network).
Also, brands that already have a customer base can also use the ‘Request a review’ button to generate early momentum faster than any brand-new sellers on Amazon.
The Four Mistakes That Trip Up DTC Brands on Amazon
1. Treating Amazon listings like a Shopify product page
The Amazon’s search algorithm doesn’t “want” just a beautiful copy; instead, what truly matters is keyword relevance.
Your Shopify Product Detailed Pages (PDP) are written for humans that are scrolling on their mobiles, but your Amazon listings need to be written for both the algorithm and a buyer who’s comparing you with five other results simultaneously.
What this process means is that you need to make sure your listings have keyword-optimized titles and relevant backend search items and that there are bullet points that highlight the benefits right away.
2. Launching ads before the listing is ready
There are a number of things you need to do before sending PPC (pay-per-click) traffic. This process actually involves making sure that your listings are fully optimized and that all of your images are of high quality; otherwise, you will be risking wasting your money.
We’ve seen brands spend $5,000 in the first month of their launching with a 60% ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale) because the conversion rate was 3% instead of the 12% they’d see with optimized creative. So, first thing first—make sure your listing is fixed.
3. Ignoring pricing discipline
The Amazon algorithm is pretty rough, and it will penalize you if your prices are inconsistent in your Shopify and Amazon accounts at the same time, so you need to be really careful with that.
For example, if there is a sale going on on Shopify, let’s say (30% off), while on Amazon you are selling at full price, you risk losing the Buy Box “Add to Cart," which is the placement that drives the majority of the purchases.
So, always make sure your Amazon price is at or below the publicly available price anywhere online.
4. Running Amazon and Shopify as completely separate operations
Inventory, pricing and fulfillment decisions that are made in isolation create channel conflicts, so it’s always essential to manage both channels in a coordinated way, which will outperform those that are not doing it.
I will break this process down in the section below.
Before You Launch: What to Set Up First
Before you spend any money on ads, there are four essential blocks. These steps will determine the success of your launch and will prevent it from flatlining within 60 days.
Step 1: Choose the Right Amazon Selling Plan (Individual vs. Professional, FBA vs. FBM)
If you sell more than 40 items a month, your best option is the Professional Plan, which costs $39.99/month. Here you will have many tools for support, such as promotional features and analytics.
The Individual plan, however, is very different from the first one I mentioned. This one charges $0.99 per sale, and it doesn’t allow any advertising. This makes your ability to reach a wider audience very limited; not to mention, growing your brand is almost impossible!
When it comes to choosing fulfillment, here you have two options: FBA and FBM. Here is how they differ:
- FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon): Amazon stores and ships the products for you
- FBM (Fulfillment by Merchant): You are handling all of your product’s storage and you’re also in charge of the shipping.
FBA is clearly what works better, because with this option, you can enjoy the benefits of your Prime eligibility, and better Buy Boxes, and also the Amazon customer service.
Step 2: Set Up Seller Central and Enrol in Brand Registry
Amazon Seller Central is the dashboard where you manage your account: the listings, inventory, ads and reports and everything else. Once you apply, you will have it in 2-5 days.
But this doesn’t mean you should wait until everything is ready to apply for it; instead, it’s best to do this first and then focus on the listings.
With the Amazon Brand Registry, it’s a different case. In order to sell in your country, you need a registered or pending trademark, and this one will take a couple of months to obtain.
However, once you are approved, you can enjoy the benefits of the A+ Content, Brand Stores, Vine and Sponsored Brands ads.
Step 3: Decide Your Catalog and Pricing Strategy
It’s always best to start with 3 to 5 best-selling products that have strong demand, excellent margins, and clear differentiation, rather than launching your full Shopify catalog at once.
Each Amazon product gets an ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) and that is a unique listing ID. If you have a product with more variations, such as size or color, it’s best to group them in parent-child listings.
In this way, all of your listings will remain together, which usually improves conversion compared to having separate listings.
Step 4: Build Your Listings Before Running Ads
Your product listings will convert traffic into sales, so here's what to do before running ads.
Your listings need to include:
- A keyword-focused title which is under 200 characters for each listing
- 5 bullet points that highlight the key benefits of your listing
- A description or A+ Content that explains the brand
- At least 6 high-quality images and infographic visuals
Amazon Best Sellers Rank measures how well a product sells within its category.
It improves once you start making sales, so before running any ads, make sure your listing is fully optimized.
Olifant Proof: When Ekster came to us, when they were expanding their catalog, we helped them structure their listings before launching any ads.
We did everything, from creating keyword-focused titles to making conversion-driven bullet points and adding high-quality images. This strong listing foundation helped them obtain an annual profitability result of $688,406.
Tip: A well-designed A+ Content can increase conversion rates and will help your product to stand out on the page, ultimately leading to improved visibility and higher sales in the Amazon Best Sellers Rank.
The 90-Day Amazon Launch Playbook for Shopify Brands
It’s crucial to follow the rules when it comes to launching any brands on Amazon.
For example, if you decide to run ads immediately, before having any reviews on your products or optimized listings and clean benchmarks, you are making one costly mistake that will make you lose $8000 to $15,000.
A structured rollout, on the other hand, is a much better alternative and here is what one looks like:
Phase 1 (Days 1–30): Foundation and Ranking Velocity
In the initial phase, all the focus should be on your reviews and the overall search visibility. What I recommend doing is enrolling in the Amazon Vine program and sending 30 units to trusted reviewers. This will help you generate early feedback on your products.
At the same time, you need to launch simple PPC campaigns and see which products will convert into sales. You don’t need to optimize anything yet, as this stage is essential for collecting data.
One other thing that helps your Amazon Best Sellers rank is the Amazon Request a Review Tool, which is basically asking your customers for a review. This will strengthen the organic visibility over time.
Phase 2 (Days 31–60): Scale What Works
In the second phrase, it’s time to pull the search terms and see what works and what doesn’t.
If you see a keyword with more orders than three, and its ACoS is within your target range, it’s time to increase the bid and move it to a match campaign. Such search terms are the best indicator that you can make sales.
At the same time, you should pause any keywords that have received 30 or more clicks without any conversions.
If you have established your storefront, now it's time to start using Amazon Sponsored Brands Ads to drive traffic straight to your brand storefront. And the goal here would be to spend more on what works and less on what doesn't.
Phase 3 (Days 61–90): Optimize for Profitability
By the time you hit the last phase, you already have the needed data to evaluate the overall performance.
While most sellers focus solely on ACoS, which measures ad spend in comparison to sales generated by ads, a more complete metric that you should have in mind is TACos. This metric compares the ad spend to total revenue gained from both ads and organic sales.
With this metric, you get a clear perspective about your profitability. As your listings begin to rank higher and get more organic sales, TACoS should decrease.
So, the ultimate goal is to make your whole Amazon channel more efficient and profitable.
Amazon PPC for Shopify Brands: What's Different
Amazon ads might feel familiar with ads on Facebook or Google, but there is definitely a difference and here at this point is where most brands actually struggle.
Don’t Run Amazon PPC Like Facebook Ads
While on Facebook, ads interrupt users as they browse; on Amazon, ads appear when someone searches for a product to buy. And that’s changing the whole strategy.
On Amazon, the product listing is what sells, but the ads help your listing to appear in search results. If your listing is not converting well, it’s pointless to increase the bids or ad budget.
Audience targeting is another key difference.
While on Facebook you can choose the audience, on Amazon keywords are what determine the audience, and that’s why the first 30 days after you launch are dedicated to learning which search terms actually led to purchases for your products.
TACoS vs. ACoS: The Metric That Matters
As I stated earlier, most sellers are focused on tracking ACoS, which measures how much you spend on ads in comparison to what your ads actually generate.
A much more useful metric for long-term growth is TACoS. This metric compares your total ad spend to all the revenue you have made, including the ad-driven and organic sales.
For brands that are still growing, TACoS should gradually decline as the organic ranking starts to improve. This change is because now more customers will be able to find your brand organically rather than with paid ads.
What I mean is:
- A brand with 30% ACoS and 12% TACoS is having organic sales.
- A brand with 20% ACoS and 19% TACoS is still very dependent on ads.
So, the ultimate goal is to build organic momentum that will slowly reduce the long-term ad dependency.
MatchaBar managed to add $114,305 in monthly revenue on Amazon after we used TACoS in their campaigns for targeting. Reports on the wrong metric -ACoS, in this case—had been masking how much spend was going to low-intent placements.
The 1-1-1-1 Campaign Structure
Many brands use the one campaign structure 1-1-1-1, which translates into 1 campaign, 1 ad group, 1 keyword and 1 match type. When you see this structure, you might think it’s ineffective, but in fact, it makes the campaign data much clearer.
This structure makes it easier to identify which keyword drives sales, compared to having multiple keywords mixed together.
A typical structure looks like this:
- Automatic campaigns to discover search terms
- Broad match campaigns to test buyer intent
- Phrase match campaigns to confirm demand
- Exact match campaigns to scale the best-performing keywords
Here, each stage feeds the next, which leads to gradually identifying the keywords that truly convert.
MatchaBar’s monthly revenue has come from rebuilding their account using this structure after they have been running everything mixed in two campaigns.
Managing Shopify and Amazon Together Without Cannibalising Either
A very common question among the DTC founders is whether the Amazon sales will cannibalize the sales on their Shopify account. The short answer is no—if managed properly.
In most cases, the opposite thing happens. This is because each channel has a different type of buyer, so Amazon shoppers might still not be familiar with your brand and search by product category instead.
While on Shopify it’s a different case. Customers usually visit because they are already familiar with your brand or have already made a previous purchase.
This scenario means that each channel is supporting the other, meaning if a client purchases your product on Amazon and they enjoy it, they are likely to come back to your Shopify store and browse there too.
A positive example of this is Coat Defense. While scaling their Amazon channel, we have also helped them increase their direct-to-consumer (DTC) revenue by $699,786 per month, bringing their combined revenue close to $1M monthly across both channels.
The growth came from coordinated pricing, inventory planning and using Amazon’s performance data to improve Shopify merchandising.
Inventory management matters
If you are currently using FBA, it’s best to set reorder points early enough to account for Amazon’s inbound processing time, which is anywhere from 3 to 7 days for standard products.
Running out of stock will make your Amazon’s Best Sellers Rank to reset, and this will affect your account, and it will be challenging to recover, even after several weeks.
To avoid this problem, you can use third-party logistics or a warehouse system to ensure that your inventory remains stocked and available for sale,
Pricing also needs coordination
You should be careful with the consistency of the prices on your Shopify and Amazon accounts. Large public discounts on Shopify can trigger Amazon’s Fair Pricing Policy, and that can even contribute to suppressing your Buy Box.
If you feel like promoting products on Shopify, it’s best to offer exclusive promotions to email subscribers or members so the discount is not publicly indexed.
When to Hire an Agency vs. DIY
There is no correct answer on when to actually hire an agency or when to do it on your own.
Everything comes down to how complex your catalog is, your available budget, the overall PPC (pay-per-click) experience, and how quickly you need traction.
If you have divided opinions, the following table can help you make the decision easier
Cost is one of the most determining factors here. Most Amazon agencies charge anywhere from $1,500 to $5,000 a month depending on the scope of work, so if your projected first-year Amazon revenue is around $50,000 it doesn’t make sense to pay a monthly retainer.
However, if your brand is aiming at $300,000 in just one year, which is realistic for a brand that already has a Shopify brand, the investment can be easier to justify.
Taking all costs aside, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is not the hiring-an-agency part, but missing the launch window because of poor listings or reviews or improperly optimized PPC campaigns.
How Olifant Digital Launches Shopify Brands on Amazon
Since 2018, we at Olifant Digital have helped launch and scale over 50 Amazon accounts for DTC and Shopify brands.
Here is our process and how the numbers have looked for the brands we’ve worked with:
Ekster came to us as a premium wallet brand with strong Shopify traction but not a presence on Amazon.
We have helped them build their whole channel from scratch, including catalog strategy, listing optimization with A+ Content, Brand Registry enrollment, and a structured PPC launch using the 1-1-1-1 framework.
The result was $688,406 in their annual Amazon profitability, and right now, they are category leaders for their flagship wallet line.
Bullstap is a leather accessories brand that managed to scale 85% of Amazon revenue month over month after we completely rebuilt their PPC structure and consolidated their product variation into parent-child listings.
This review, along with the changes we made, improved their rate by 18% on their core ASIN.
Being such a case, I should mention that we don’t take on every brand. We work with the best Shopify-native brands that have at least $500,000 in annual DTC revenue, clear product-market fit, and the inventory structure to support FBA.
If that sounds like you, we would love to hear about your launch goals. You can see our library for more results.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sell on Amazon if I already have a Shopify store?
Yes, you can, and this approach will actually give you a significant advantage when you are launching on Amazon. This is all because your product data, customer insights, and brand assets are transferred directly to your Amazon listing strategy.
The two platforms are not mutually exclusive, but they serve different buyer intents and can be used in a coordinated way so you can grow the total brand revenue.
Will Amazon hurt my Shopify sales?
Amazon will not hurt your Shopify sales, as long as you have coordinated the prices with a specific customer journey in mind.
Amazon shoppers are usually buyers that are searching by product type, whereas Shopify buyers tend to be brand-aware, and they often do repeat purchases. A strong Amazon presence will lead to feeding your Shopify growth by exposing your brand to customers that will later seek you out directly.
Coat Defense is the perfect example for that. We’ve helped them grow both their channels at the same time, helping them reach 1M in total monthly revenue without cannibalizing each other.
How long does it take to launch on Amazon?
The whole process of Seller Central setup to a first live listing can vary anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks. This delay is due to the Brand Registry approval and the final listing creation.
Getting your first revenue might take longer. Brands see traction (consistent organic ranking and a TACoS below 20%) around the 60-90 day mark.
Working with an experienced team can sometimes speed up the process, but still, it’s important to leave time for reviews, rankings and data to build. This is why most brands avoid planning their inventory or cash flow around Amazon revenue during the first 30 days.
What budget do I need to launch on Amazon?
A budget launch includes several parts:
• Fulfillment by Amazon setup and initial inventory
• PPC advertising campaigns
• Amazon Vine enrollment (about $200 per parent ASIN)
• Product photography or A+ Content design
For advertising alone, you can start with $2,000 to $3,000 for the first 30 days. This time stamp will allow you to gain data and to understand which keywords and campaigns are actually doing the work.
For a brand that is launching three SKUs (stock keeping units, which are distinct products), the total cost for 90 days is anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 before the channel can start supporting itself.
Brands that are trying to save on these costs usually take longer to reach profitability because they don’t have enough data to make informed decisions about their marketing strategies and product positioning.
How do I protect my brand pricing on Amazon?
Your brand is first and foremost protected by the Amazon Brand Registry, so if some sellers are trying to use your product pages, you can report listing hijackers and unauthorized sellers.
A lot of brands also set a Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policy and share it with the distributors or retail partners who might try to sell the products elsewhere. This helps to prevent price undercutting across different channels.
Another thing you should frequently check is your listings. If some seller offers the product at a lower price, you might lose the “Buy Box," which can significantly reduce the conversions.
Since there are many unauthorized sellers, which is a standard issue, you can apply for Amazon’s Brand Gating Program, which requires sellers to receive approval before they list your products.
Does Olifant Digital work with Shopify brands launching on Amazon?
Yes. Our main service is helping Shopify brands to launch and scale on Amazon.
Our typical work includes setting up the Amazon account, enrolling the brand in Amazon Brand Registry, creating optimized A+ listings (enhanced product descriptions that improve customer engagement), building PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns, and coordinating Amazon performance with the Shopify channel at the same time.
We have worked with brands in several categories, including apparel, accessories, health, wellness, and consumer packaged goods.
All established Shopify brands that want to expand into Amazon or improve their existing launch should review our case studies.
