Why Amazon

Before choosing what to sell, it is worth being clear about why you would sell on somebody else's marketplace rather than on a shop of your own. This lesson makes that case. The short version: Amazon already has the two things a new shop spends years and a great deal of money trying to build, which are buyers and their trust.

The traffic is already there

Amazon is among the largest online marketplaces in the world, and it operates separate marketplaces for separate countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan and more. Between them they list an enormous catalogue. Exact product counts are not published and every figure you will see quoted is somebody's estimate, so treat the specific numbers in the video as illustration.

If you build your own shop, every visitor has to be found and paid for, through advertising, search rankings or an audience you have already built. On Amazon the visitors are there before you arrive. Your job is narrower: get your offer in front of people who are already looking for that exact product.

Amazon is where many product searches start

The behaviour that matters most to a seller is where people begin a product search. Survey figures on this vary by country, by year and by who commissioned the survey, so no single percentage is worth quoting. What is not in dispute is the direction: a substantial share of shoppers begin on Amazon rather than on a search engine, and many who find something elsewhere first still check Amazon before buying, to see whether the same item is available cheaper, faster or from a seller they already trust.

That second habit is the important one. It means Amazon captures demand created somewhere else. A shopper can see a product in a shop window or an advertisement and still buy it on Amazon ten minutes later.

Prime changed what buyers expect

Amazon Prime is a paid membership that bundles fast delivery with other benefits. Its effect on sellers is indirect but large:

• Members tend to buy more often, and to buy from Amazon by default rather than comparing.
• Members filter for Prime delivery, so a listing without it is invisible to part of the audience.
• Fast, free delivery has become the baseline expectation rather than a feature.

You do not have to build any of that. Fulfilment by Amazon, covered in the next lesson, is how a small seller can offer Prime delivery without owning a warehouse or negotiating a courier contract. It is not automatic: the offer has to meet Amazon's eligibility conditions, and your account has to be in good standing. Prime itself is a paid Amazon membership whose benefits and delivery terms differ by country.

Most of what sells on Amazon is not sold by Amazon

A common assumption is that Amazon sells its own stock and that is the end of it. It is not true. Amazon reports that well over half of the units sold in its store come from independent sellers, which is to say from businesses of every size, including one-person operations working from home. Amazon updates that figure periodically, so check the current one rather than repeating a number from a video.

That is the opening this course is built on. The marketplace is open, the rules are published, and a new seller lists against the same catalogue and the same buyers as an established one.

What you give up in exchange

The trade is real and worth stating plainly, because the lesson does not dwell on it:

• Amazon owns the customer relationship. You are not building a marketing list. Amazon's policies govern what you may collect and how you may contact a buyer, and they are enforced, so read the current seller rules rather than assuming.
• Amazon sets the rules and can change them. Categories get restricted, fees get revised, and policies apply to you whether or not they suit you.
• You compete on the same listing. On a marketplace where many sellers offer the same item, price and fulfilment decide who sells it. Later lessons on the Buy Box and on repricing are about exactly this.
• Fees are the cost of the traffic. A referral fee on every sale, plus fulfilment and storage fees if you use FBA. Rates vary by category, marketplace and fulfilment method, and the current schedule is published on Amazon's own selling pages (US, UK). Work from that, not from a figure in a lesson.

For someone starting with limited money, that trade is usually worth taking. Building an audience is slow and uncertain; renting one is immediate and priced.

A note on the figures in the video

The video quotes market share, member counts and average annual spend. Those numbers were current when it was recorded and they move every year, so treat them as illustration rather than as figures to repeat. The structural argument behind them has not changed: Amazon is where a very large number of product searches begin, and it lets independent sellers list against that demand.

The next lesson covers the mechanism that makes this practical at a small scale, which is Fulfilment by Amazon.