Sellers branch out beyond Amazon

2024 was the year sellers became less loyal to Amazon.

January 18, 2025

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In a survey of 2,000 Amazon sellers, third-party merchants listed “expanding to other e-commerce platforms or online channels” as one of their top priorities in 2024. The team who put the survey together expects this trend to continue in 2025.

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The reason is two-fold:

Amazon’s new fees cut into sellers’ margins, and the platform has become increasingly complicated for business owners
At the same time, legitimate competitors such as Walmart Marketplace, TikTok Shop, Temu, Shopify, etc., are comparatively charging lower fees to lure more merchants to their platforms

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Put together, sellers are becoming less loyal to Amazon. Jon Elder, the CEO of Black Label Advisor, which manages hundreds of brands selling on Amazon, expects to see brands that used to do 95% of their revenue on Amazon averaging 75% going forward.

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While it’s hard to imagine sellers completely abandoning Amazon, if enough sellers branch out, that could materially impact Amazon’s economics. That doesn’t bode well, considering Elder says, “he [doesn’t] know a single Amazon native seller who is not expanding away from Amazon.”