Amazon vs Shopify vs Call Centers: What Half a Billion in Product Sales Taught Me

Three Platforms, One Question

You have a physical product brand and you want to know how to grow it. Where should you start? Amazon? Shopify? A call center? I'm going to break down what I believe are the three most important platforms you need to be paying attention to if you want to grow a physical product business in 2025 and beyond.

This is coming from somewhere around $500 million in physical product sales that I'm dealing with right now, this year alone. These are not feelings I have. These are not opinions. This is what the data shows me every single day.

First, let's get the definitions straight. Shopify is your own website, your own e-commerce cart. There are other options, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, but Shopify has been my preferred platform for many, many years because they keep developing and evolving. Amazon is their website, built by Jeff Bezos and millions of stockholders. And the call center is your people, on the phone, talking to humans. Three completely different games.

Amazon Is a Trust Play, Not Your Business

You know what Amazon has above everybody else? Something you're never going to overtake. I'm sorry, but they won that game. They have trust. When people see that yellow smile, they immediately trust the platform. So when you go on Amazon as a physical product brand, it's a trust play. You're leveraging the power of the Amazon brand to get people to believe you're the real deal. I like to describe Amazon as the place where a brand becomes legit.

And they have traffic you will never replicate. The United States has around 300 million citizens. Imagine roughly 120 million of them on a membership that lets them buy with free shipping and same-day, even two-hour, delivery. You are pretty much never going to compete with that. Traffic equals eyeballs, attention, human beings interested in what you offer. Without traffic, there is no business. It doesn't matter how good your products are.

But here's the danger. There are Amazon sellers who only do Amazon, and I consider that a big liability. If Amazon wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, they are the bosses, not you. Trust me, I've lived it. Back in 2016 I was selling bed sheets online, a brand called Cosy House Collection. We were doing $600,000 a month. One day I woke up to an email that said: you have been shut down, your account is permanently terminated. I couldn't control that. They run the show, and they can shut you down without asking questions.

The $30 Order vs the $100 Order

Here's what actually happens on Amazon. Somebody buys one product. That's it. $30, $40, $50, and they're gone. Amazon controls that audience, not you. Even though I've built entire brands with complementary products designed to work together, I don't get to introduce people to the full brand on Amazon. Amazon introduces whatever it wants, including other brands that are not mine.

Take my supplement brand, a nine-figure business. On Amazon, we sell one product at an average of $32, thousands of times every single day. But when I send people to my own website, us.naturalslim.com, that $30 order becomes $100. People buy three products minimum, because I get to introduce them to the rest of the brand. That's average order value. On Amazon, you get $30. On Shopify, you get $100.

That's the difference between building a product and building a brand. On your own e-commerce, you can upsell whatever you believe will actually work better for that person. You put those products there on purpose so you can handle problems at a larger scale. Amazon will never let you do that.

The Call Center: Turn Your Product into a Service

Something we did along the journey, and something I highly recommend to anyone building a physical product brand: go from being a physical product company to being a service company. We have a call center with over 100 people answering the phone for customers across the nation. And here's what happens there: people get the entire brand, because they're talking to humans.

So the ladder goes like this. Amazon, $30 an order. Shopify, $100 an order. The call center, $200 an order. And conversion on the phone is at the highest possible level. It's very rare that one of our people gets somebody on the phone and doesn't close them, because you're showing them something they're looking for: care. There's no AI today that will replace an actual human being caring about you at the level a real human working for your brand can.

Compare the conversion rates. On Amazon, conversion can hit 40 percent, because those are buyers searching for products. On your own e-commerce, if you're a good marketer, maybe 3 to 5 percent, because you're taking cold people from Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube and trying to turn them into buyers. On the call center? 80 to 90 percent. These people close almost every single time.

Be on All Three

So what's the answer? You should be on every single one of these platforms. Amazon gives you trust and traffic you can't buy. Shopify gives you control, upsells, and triple the order value. The call center gives you the highest conversion and the deepest relationship with your customer.

There are other opportunities too. We've been doing Walmart e-commerce, and Walmart is pushing hard to become another giant. But let me tell you, they're not there yet. People are not actively buying on Walmart or Target at the levels Amazon has. Not even close. If you have the ability to expand, get on Walmart, Target, Etsy, all of them. Massive distribution, as much as you can handle.

But if you can only focus on three areas as a physical product brand, make it these. Start the call center light: one consultant, one salesperson, one person on the line. Promote a phone number and give people help over the phone. Build your e-commerce on Shopify. Get your listings right on Amazon and let their traffic introduce people to your brand every single day. The technology exists for you to win this game. Now go build it.