Are Ebay and Amazon underated as E-commerce sales channels?

I've just been having a catch up with a former client who's coming back for some more work, and our discussion has raised some interesting issues about the use of Ebay and Amazon.


They run a b2c niche e-commerce store which is well designed (but still has a few SEO issues to sort out). None the less, it's been going a while so the site is doing pretty well in natural search results and the client also uses a modest amount of Google Adwords for some targeted product ranges.

What really surprises me though, is the fact that the majority of business is done through an Ebay shop and an Amazon marketplace seller account. They've been on Ebay for a while and always done well, but Amazon has only recently been added and is already generating more sales than Ebay.

This makes me wonder how many other e-commerce stores are overlooking these sales channels? Of course they aren't for everyone - I guess it would depend on your target market and products sold.

More specifically, I know a drop ship e-commerce retailer that has had problems with Ebay when their supplier can't fulfil a specific product and the ebayer gets a but precious about accepting an alternative to the product they bid on. Amazon isn't perfect either - their Seller central system doesn't let you obtain the email addresses of your customers for use in repeat marketing to protect their precious relationship with the buyer, which I find surprisingly short sighted - especially from someone like Amazon who obviously know that in e-commerce the lifetime value of a customer is often more important than their initial order.

Plus, the cost of sales needs to be borne in mind - my client pays about 15% in selling fees to these platforms. But then, how does this compare to the cost of sales from Google Adwords?

If you can make it work for your business, it seems to be that marketplace channels like Ebay and Amazon shouldn't be overlooked, especially in the current economic climate.