Marketplace sales for one of our product lines dropped by about half.

Half.

That'll get your attention pretty fast.

At first, I thought we had a marketplace problem. Maybe the ads had changed. Maybe our ranking had dropped. Maybe a new competitor had moved in. Maybe the price was off. Honestly, some of those things did need our attention.

But the bigger problem wasn't sitting inside the marketplace.

The bigger problem was that we had let one platform become too much of the business.

When one sales channel controls your product business

This is what ecommerce platform dependence actually looks like from the inside. It doesn't feel like risk. It feels like a good month.

Amazon is bringing in orders every day. Your Shopify store is growing. Etsy keeps sending the right customer. One retailer is placing big orders. Your ad account is carrying the month. That's not a problem. That's a business that's working.

The problem is when that one channel becomes the only real way customers can find you and buy from you, and sometimes the only place that has the customer relationship too. As long as the orders keep coming, that's easy to put off. Then something changes, and you find out how much of the business was sitting behind that one door.

Why product businesses put off building a second sales channel

Most of us already know we should build another way to sell. We tell ourselves we'll get to it when things calm down.

That calm week never seems to show up, and when your main channel is working, every other channel feels slow by comparison. Your email list is still small. Your website needs more traffic. Wholesale takes time. A new marketplace has a whole new set of rules. So the time and money keeps going to the place that's already bringing in orders, right up until that channel slows down and there's less time, less cash, and a lot less patience left to build something new.

That's the trap behind most ecommerce platform dependence: the best time to build a second sales channel is while the first one is still working, not after it stops.

What happens when Amazon (or any one channel) is your only sales channel

You don't need to sell everywhere. Trying to be on Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, Walmart, TikTok Shop, wholesale, retail, and a farmer's market all at once can turn one business into six businesses, with you as the unpaid employee in all six.

You need one good second sales channel, chosen for your customer and your product, not because it's trending. In Episode 2, I walk through how to think about the right second door depending on whether your main channel is a marketplace, a retailer, an ad platform, or a single wholesale account, plus the exact number I want every product-business owner to calculate: what percentage of total sales is sitting behind your biggest channel right now, and what that means if that channel slowed down for a month.

One problem. One fix. One clear next step.

Listen to the podcast. 

Free resource: the Second Door Plan