When You Shop on Amazon : A Simple Breakdown
For every $100 you spend:
- About $50+ goes to Amazon for:
- Advertising fees (15%)
- Sales commission (8-15%)
- Warehousing and logistics (20-35%)
- Only about $40 goes to the actual seller
In other words, for each product you purchase, more than 50% of the price goes to Amazon, and only 40% goes to the merchant.
Moreover, with the increasing monopolistic trend of e-commerce platforms in recent years, merchants can only keep profits by reducing wage costs and factory prices. This is the root reason why products are becoming more expensive but of lower quality and why online business is so difficult nowadays.
Tech Giants like Amazon have absolute power and pricing ability compared to small merchants.Mr. President Trump said that he will reduce the price. The best way to reduce prices is to debate Tech Giants and share profits with merchants and consumers. However, making Tech Giants to share profits is not easy. Obviously, the previous Mr. President Biden couldn’t make it done when facing with questions about inflation.
So what can merchants do to deal with declining profits in the face of increasingly high traffic fees from Internet giants? We can understand this world like this: traffic on e-commerce platforms is public domain traffic. When customers buy products on e-commerce platforms, it’s partly due to trust in the platform and partly trust in the merchant. The current problem is that e-commerce platforms use customers’ trust in merchants to strengthen their own platform’s credibility, and in turn make merchants pay more fees.
Compared to public domain traffic, merchants should simultaneously build private domain traffic. You can imagine public domain traffic as the ocean and private domain traffic as your own private pond. Merchants should connect the small pond with the ocean, letting customers who truly recognize and trust you move from public domain traffic into your private domain traffic, where you can provide better service, products, and prices.
Is private domain traffic just about registering a domain name, setting up a server, and opening Shopify? This is currently a popular private domain traffic model, but due to obvious drawbacks, it still can’t compete with traditional e-commerce platforms.
The biggest drawback is customer user experience. Customers are not professional personnel; they need an enjoyable shopping process. With Shopify, customers need to remember website domains, but remembering more than 10 is extremely difficult. Secondly, customers need to register, log in, and enter bank card and shipping information for each website, which is fatally inconvenient.
MyTrustStore was born based on this business concept, devote it to focusing on being a software service provider, not involving itselft with merchant business, and returning all power to merchants and customers.
From the customer’s perspective, customers have complete power to manage their trusted merchant list.
From the merchant’s perspective, merchants only need to pay minimal software usage fees to receive payment funds directly from customers, without worrying about their accounts being frozen by e-commerce platform companies.
MyTrustStore simplily provides a bridge, letting customers build their own merchant lists while allowing merchants to choose their customers and provide matching prices.
Imagine this scenario: when customers enter MyTrustStore, they see merchants they trust most, maybe they’re retail stores just nearby,or maybe they are excellent internet vendors, or maybe they’re your business partner. Customers can enjoy much cheaper price and a superior shopping experience, and your store could be one of them.
