You Don't Own Your Amazon Customers. You Don't Own Your Website Ones Either.

Here's a bit of received wisdom that gets repeated so often people have stopped questioning it: "I don't want to sell on a marketplace because I won't own the customer. I'll sell on my own website, where the customer is mine."

Selling on your own website is a good thing — do it, I'm not arguing against it. But the logic people use to justify it is flawed, and it's built on a misconception I really want to break, because it leads to genuinely bad decisions. Here it is plainly: you don't own the customer on Amazon, true — but you don't own the customer on your own website either. Nobody owns the customer. The whole idea of "owning" a customer is the myth.

The comfortable version of the myth

Let me start with the bit everyone already half-knows, because it's the easy half. On Amazon, you clearly don't own the customer relationship — you don't get their email, their phone, their real contact details; you can't freely market to them again; Amazon keeps all of it. Most sellers accept that. It's why they say they'll go build on their "own" website instead, where surely the customer is theirs.

And that's where the thinking stops, and where it goes wrong.

Now the uncomfortable half

Walk through what "my own website" actually is, because when you look closely, you're renting nearly all of it too.

Your website? It's Shopify — or something like it. You don't own that infrastructure; you're renting it, monthly, from a third party who can change the terms whenever they like. Your traffic? It's coming from Google and social — rented, both of them, and gone the moment the algorithm shifts or your ad budget stops. Your email list, the one asset that feels genuinely yours? You're almost certainly sending it through a third-party provider you're also renting, under their rules, and one policy change away from problems. Even your fulfilment — you might pick and pack in your own unit, but the second that parcel leaves your hands it's on a third-party carrier's sophisticated network doing the last mile to your customer. You own a surprisingly thin slice of your "own" operation. Most of it is rented infrastructure with your logo on it.

So the difference between "owning" a customer on your website versus on Amazon shrinks to almost nothing. On your site you have one extra thing — a method of contacting them beyond the platform they bought through: their email, their mobile. That's real, and it's worth having. But it is a thread of contact, not ownership, and people wildly overvalue it.

Why the contact method isn't ownership

Here's the part that dismantles the myth completely. That email address you're so proud of? It does not make the customer yours, because that same customer is not in an exclusive relationship with you. Over 86% of consumers shop on Amazon. They are being bombarded with advertising everywhere they go. And I promise you, they are getting emails from your competitor brands too — sitting in the same inbox as yours, right next to yours. Having someone's email doesn't mean you own them; it means you're one of a dozen brands with permission to land in their inbox, all shouting at the same person.

There is no exclusive relationship. There never was. The customer who bought from your website will happily buy from your competitor next week, from Amazon the week after, from whoever catches them at the right moment with the right offer. You didn't own them — you rented their attention for one transaction, exactly like you do on Amazon. The website just gave you a slightly longer, slightly more direct lease. It's a better rental. It is not ownership.

So what do you actually protect?

If ownership is a myth everywhere — marketplace and website alike — then the strategic question changes completely. It's not "how do I get somewhere I own the customer" (nowhere), it's "what can I actually build that makes a customer choose me, over and over, wherever they happen to be shopping?"

And the answer is the only thing in this entire business that's genuinely yours: your brand. Your IP. The reputation and recognition and trust that make a customer — sitting in an inbox full of competitors, one search away from a dozen alternatives on Amazon — still choose you. That's the bit you should be spending your time and energy protecting, because it's the one asset that isn't rented from Shopify or Google or Amazon or a carrier. It lives in the customer's head, and it's the only thing that makes any of these rented channels pay off.

This is why "I'll sell on my website so I own the customer" is the wrong frame. Sell on your website and Amazon and wherever your customers are — you don't own them in any of those places, so be in all of them. And pour your real effort into the brand that makes them pick you across every one, because if you're not present and memorable, you're simply driving your hard-won traffic toward whichever competitor is. The customer was never the asset. The brand that wins the customer, again and again, on rented ground everywhere — that's the asset. That's the only thing you own.

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About the author

Zamir Cajee is co-founder of This Way Up, a UK business specialising in Amazon marketplace strategy, and co-host of The Upside Podcast, where he and the team break down how Amazon actually works — and how it lies to you. Zamir has built multi-million dollar businesses from scratch and has been selling into the EU since 2016.

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