Your Options To Sell On Amazon

As a brand looking to optimize your results on the Amazon channel, the first question you need to answer is: how should you work on the marketplace?

There are three broad models you can follow, each with their own pros and cons.

Let’s take a quick look.

Sell to Amazon (1P/Vendor Central)

In this model, you sell wholesale to Amazon as you do to other retailers. It’s very simple from your end, scales well, and it's a great model for large brands, especially if your products are at a lower price point.

The downside is that they set retail prices, control promotions, and own the customer relationship. Often, this leads to suboptimal growth, and negotiations with Amazon are often rigid.

Sell Yourself

You open your own seller account and sell your products directly. This is often a good solution for brands with a focus on DTC sales. You get complete control and full data, as well as retail margins.

The main advantage is also the biggest downside: you have to manage it.

You handle the catalog, set prices, run ads, and hold inventory risk (often via FBA) with all the operational complexity of the platform: compliance, logistics, account health, support, advertising, and constant optimization. Which usually means you need a dedicated team, diluting your focus, or pay an agency to do it for you.

Sell To 3P Partners

In this model, you open up distribution to a group of resellers, with varying degrees of “hands off” approach. On paper, this spreads risk and effort, and frees you from the burden of handling the platform while keeping you in control.

The downside is that, if you have multiple 3P sellers, it’s easy to lose control completely. Everything is fragmented: pricing, inventory, content, ads, and data. No one party is responsible for the full outcome, and growth often lags behind.

The Key Is Control

While none of these options is inherently wrong or right, each has tradeoffs and exists in a different place in the control spectrum. On one side, handling Amazon yourself keeps you in absolute control; on the other, letting anyone sell your products guarantees a mess.

Control, on Amazon, is a necessary condition for success.

At Zoplenti, we operate as an exclusive third party seller, ordering your products wholesale and reselling while handling the platform end-to-end. This way, you get the best of both worlds: the platform is controlled, but you have an operational partner handling it for you.

‍