153 - Selling Merchandise on Amazon — The Pros, Cons & Hidden Tradeoffs for Sports Teams

Should your team be selling merchandise on Amazon?

In this episode, Jeremy breaks down the real strategic implications of adding Amazon as a sales channel — from margin math and SEO strategy to customer data ownership and cannibalization risk. If you're responsible for revenue, merchandise, or digital marketing, this is your practical roadmap before you jump in.

Key Topics Covered

• Why Amazon is more search engine than storefront — and why that matters
• The real math behind Amazon’s 15% referral fee
• FBA vs. FBM: Fulfillment by Amazon vs. Merchant fulfillment
• The hidden cost of losing first-party customer data
• Why you should never push your fans from Shopify to Amazon
• How Amazon SEO works (and why semantic SEO matters)
• Why city/state-forward merchandise should launch before team-branded items
• How to prevent Shopify cannibalization
• Pricing strategy: Why you may want to charge more on Amazon
• Using Amazon strictly as an acquisition channel
• Connecting Shopify to Amazon with Marketplace Connect
• Modeling margin before listing a single product

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Selling Merchandise on Amazon
 01:59 Why Amazon Is a Powerful Sales Channel
 03:48 Revenue Potential During Peak Seasons
 05:42 Fulfillment Options: FBA vs FBM
 07:08 Understanding Amazon Fees and Margins
 08:32 Customer Data Ownership and Marketing Challenges
 10:54 The Importance of SEO and Search Demand
 13:14 Keyword Strategies and Search Terms
 14:58 Starting with City and State Apparel
 18:23 Semantic SEO and Listing Optimization
 20:12 Connecting Shopify and Amazon
 21:32 Getting Started and Learning the Platform
 22:29 Pricing, Margins, and Protecting Your Brand
 23:25 Strategies to Increase Sales and Customer Lifetime Value
 24:46 Balancing Amazon and Shopify for Growth
 26:10 Next Steps and Deeper Conversations

Core Strategic Takeaways

1. Amazon is an acquisition engine — not a loyalty platform.
 You will gain reach. You will gain visibility. But Amazon owns the customer relationship — not you.

2. Start broad before going branded.
 City-forward, state-pride, and general baseball apparel can build search velocity and reviews before you launch deeper team SKUs.

3. SEO is the real game.
 Amazon rankings are driven by relevance + performance + conversion velocity. Without visibility, there are no sales.

4. Model your numbers before you move inventory.
 Understand your true profit after fees. Align pricing carefully. Consider charging slightly more on Amazon to protect margin.

Resources Mentioned

• Shopify Marketplace Connect
• Marketplace Connect Tips
• Fulfillment by Merchant Overview & Referral Fees
• Amazon Seller Central
• Amazon Seller University
• Semantic SEO research tools
  • Jungle Scout
  • Helium 10
• Episode Page

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Transcript

Jeremy Neisser (00:00.756)
Welcome to episode 153 of the Sports Marketing Machine podcast powered by Revilocity Sports. I'm your host, Jeremy Nizer. Today we are digging into a topic that I have never tackled, but it seems logical if you're talking about revenue generation for teams and that is selling your merchandise on Amazon. Amazon is the largest e-commerce store

and has at one point more than 10 % of all online sales are going through it at any point. absolutely it makes like an obvious lever, more traffic, more exposure, more opportunity to make some sales. But before you jump head first into Amazon, there are some pros and there are some cons and I'm gonna break down both of which, the hidden costs, the real costs, the gotchas, can you connect Shopify to it?

what a semantic SEO is like this episode is really packed with a lot of information for you. If you're even thinking about this, selling your merchandise on Amazon or you've never thought of it and you were like, by golly, that's a great idea. So I'm going to break everything down in chunks that you can kind of take back with links to, to, to opportunities where you can kind of learn a little bit more about specific topics. There's a lot covered in this episode.

So if you have even thought about selling on Amazon, but you have no idea where to start, I feel like this is a great starter episode just for you. So let's get going.

Jeremy Neisser (01:46.51)
Let's start at the most logical spot here. Why is Amazon so attractive of a place where we can sell our merchandise? Real advantages here. Amazon is a search engine, kind of like Google's a search engine. Amazon's actually the same thing. Shopify and you are, if you use Shopify or any of those platforms to be able to sell merchandise, that that's kind of like

where you're sending people and they can click the buy and what have you. It's not necessarily a search engine. When you go to Amazon, think about how you do your searches. You might type in basketball hoodie or basketball uniform or Lakers jersey or Vermont shirt or Birmingham sweatshirt, like those types of things. That's what typically happens inside of Amazon. They don't

always search the team name and in fact I'm to cover the SEO side of this in a little bit but Amazon at a high level can introduce your brand to people who didn't even know you existed. That my friends is an acquisition power play absolutely so the friction is really low here.

Amazon converts because they've removed all the friction. It's literally two clicks and whatever you just ordered shows up your front porch the very next day. They've got saved credit cards, saved addresses, Prime, everyone trusts Prime and easy returns, right? So if you really think conversion matters, and it does, Amazon clearly wins. Can it add incremental revenue? So if you're doing

let's just say 300,000, 330,000 on Shopify and your merchandise store that people can walk up and buy. And then you're doing online. Like, can it actually add 75, $125,000 additionally annually for you? Absolutely. And I'm not just trying to share hyperbole here, but cause I really honestly think that it can under a few parameters and how you set things up. The holiday season.

Jeremy Neisser (04:01.922)
how many people shop on Amazon during the holiday season in December, Black Friday, November, like tremendous amounts, thousands, hundreds, millions of people are buying things on Amazon to get it shipped to their house so they don't have to go out to the malls and they don't have to go out local shopping to buy those things, right? Gift buyers, out of town folks who are buying things, absolutely.

Prime day like they've got the infrastructure to create so much momentum for a retailer who wants to be selling their items online. Makes sense. And the revenue is not necessarily the same though. And this is the piece where I think warrants a lot of conversation and a lot of consideration. There are real costs to selling on

Amazon some real costs Amazon's gonna take a cut they got to get paid right we get it There's two ways to do this. There's fulfillment by merchandise FBM fulfillment by merchandise or FBA fulfillment by Amazon So there's two ways to do this you can sell the items on Amazon you get the order you fulfill it Fulfillment by Amazon is you box up a bunch of shirts and you ship it to an Amazon

a place and it's inside of some sort of storage facility and their employees when an order comes in fulfills it and sends it off. Amazon will still charge referral fees on both of these. The fulfillment by Amazon is going to be higher. So let's break everything down. There's this place called Seller Central, which is if you're planning on selling on Amazon, that is the first place that you have to set up.

And I'll put a link in the show notes so you can get there and sign up. There is a process just like anything else. You have to fill out kind of the forms that they've got online, but seller central is the main spot. That's where you can list all of your items that get published to Amazon. So let's do some math. Let's just say you're selling a $50 hoodie, 15 % referral fee, which is totally normal and average that they would charge. that's $7 and 50 cents.

Jeremy Neisser (06:25.422)
and then you have to pack it up and ship it. So let's just say shipping six bucks and then packing it and sending it off is two bucks, right? Just for simple math here, you are $15.50 before the actual cost of the item. And let's just say that hoodie costs you $18. We're just making simple math here. You're sitting at $50 and then you take away 750, which is Amazon's referral fee.

And then the 18 for the cost, two bucks for someone to kind of put it together, six bucks to ship it, right? So your gross profit is $16.50. That's 33 % margin. What's your Shopify margin? It's probably 50%, 65%, significantly larger. So you are going to give up some of your margin, 15 % on average, if you sell on Amazon. So 15%.

Just think about that. So however you're charging different things. The other con here, and it may be a pro, maybe a con, but I'm going to fall into the con bucket here is when they go to your store on Shopify, when someone buys through you, you get the email, you get to market them, you get to retarget them. You could even text message them. You could put them in all of your marketing. You could do so much stuff for them, to them, right? On Amazon,

you fulfill the order, Amazon controls the relationship. They are keeping all of that first party data. You cannot freely market to these buyers. You cannot drop them into your email automation. You cannot send them an email that says, opening day's coming, buy tickets now. You can't do that because for you, Amazon is owning all of that first party data.

For you, selling it through Shopify, you're owning it. So are you willing to give up 15 % and not having the contact names of the people to move more merchandise? That's a question I'd ask you. And that's a question you probably have to ask yourself. Because for sports teams, lifetime value is a big thing. If someone goes on and buys a hat from you and they're local, and then you put them into your email,

Jeremy Neisser (08:45.674)
sequences in your constant contact or mail chip and your marketing to them and then they buy tickets and they're coming out the games and they're buying food and they're buying more merchandise right that lifetime value has grown and you controlled it when amazon they control it they got it all you just get the order and your slice of the pie from the revenue side of things

Let's talk about cannibalization for a moment here too. And this is where teams don't think about this strategically. If your fans shift from Shopify to Amazon, you're going to lose margin. You're going to lose data. You're to have to pay a commission. You're going to lose that upsell opportunity. That's not real growth. That's like leakage. That's like holes in your bucket problems here. So I would absolutely choose

both not one or the other. wouldn't tell your fans now that you're on Amazon. I would let Amazon do what Amazon does. Once you get your product set up and you're selling things on Amazon, let them do the work to help you move products on Amazon. But I wouldn't actively go tell people, Hey, we're now on Amazon because what will happen is you immediately give up 15%. You immediately right off the top.

are giving up 15 % sure it may make it easier just to ship everything to Amazon and let them deal with it I get it right but you want to keep the first party data in house so that you can upsell things later right so do you think if you shared fans that you are now on Amazon will they jump from Shopify to Amazon absolutely because they Amazon to them is so much easier and it's such a behemoth that

that it would absolutely cut into some things. So I wouldn't tell your fans that you're on Amazon. I would just let fans find it organically. You're going to lose some fans. That's bound to happen of some people that are buying merchandise from you, but you're going to get some real momentum on Amazon with people that are not in your community that are buying merchandise. All right. This is the next piece here about momentum and the search reality. Remember how I let off this podcast by saying,

Jeremy Neisser (11:07.678)
Amazon is a search platform kind of like Google, right? Search demand inside Amazon is going to be a real interesting thing that teams have never thought of. Most teams don't think about search engine optimization, SEO, inside of their team store, in their marketing, in anything that they do.

They're not thinking about, got to rank number one in Google for this because of this reason for more traffic or what have you. You're not going like teams just don't think that way. We've never thought that way. said, Hey, we want to get attention. We want people to go over to our website and we want people to buy our tickets and merchandise. Like we getting people to our games and we put together a great experience. Like that's how we think as marketing directors, we don't think about

SEO because it has never been something that warrants our attention But when you get into Amazon you are going to be drinking out of the fire hose the SEO fire hose There are so many rabbit holes with SEO semantic SEO on page SEO off page SEO There is so much to think about from an SEO perspective. So I'm gonna ask you

because this is an enormous rabbit hole that you're about to go down if you want to go down to sell on Amazon. Sure you can connect Shopify to Amazon, but you're going to be having to tweak your pages to make sure that you're ranking for specific key terms. When you're ranking for specific key terms, you get shown up higher on the Amazon searches versus others. So that is a huge thing to think about when you're doing this.

The other side of this too is that the search terms for your team are going to be very, very, very low in Amazon. Are they going to type in on Amazon, Birmingham Barron's shirt? Probably not because they went to Google and type that in, but would they be typing in Birmingham sweatshirt or Vermont visor? They might be typing those types of

Jeremy Neisser (13:27.724)
keywords in to the Amazon to find what they are looking for. So more broad match keywords versus exact match keywords. And that's where I'm going with this here. I just introduced two SEO terms right then and there for you. Like broad matches, Vermont sweatshirt. Like it's very broad. Vermont Lake Monsters sweatshirt, exact match. Like there's some differences there, right?

So the demand that lives inside of Amazon is oftentimes broader match. So in this case, I'd say Albuquerque t-shirt instead of Albuquerque isotopes t-shirt. Another broad match opportunity would be

Jeremy Neisser (14:18.798)
Birmingham baseball shirt versus Birmingham Barron's shirt. Another one would be Vermont gift for baseball fan. That's a search term that we have done in the past on Google that fans do inside of Amazon. New England baseball apparel, those broad match keywords. That's where Amazon's really good with like so.

Part of this is also thinking through how you're doing your searches on Amazon for the things that you're buying. So I hope that makes sense. But one of the big takeaways here is as you're getting started with Amazon, I would start with city forward or state forward apparel to get traction more than your team branded items. Now there might be some nuances here.

So Vermont Lake Monsters, Lake Monsters is a tourist type attraction. Absolutely. People are searching Vermont Lake Monsters in Google and an Amazon trying to see books or what have you, right? Cause it's a touristy type keyword. It is a little bit exact match cause that's the name of the team, but it's a touristy type keyword, but Charleston River Dogs that right there, there, there is no

River dogs are just dogs in the community. Like there's not a tourist attraction to river dogs, at least that I don't know of. So I think that's the second side of this too, that you're really going to have to take two steps back and think about your team name and as it relates to the community, as it relates to the apparel and what people are searching. I'm going to put some links in the show notes that will give you opportunities to go and use a couple different

tools to search your team name, your branded organization to see, are people actually searching these keywords on Amazon? I'm going to put a couple of links in there. They're going to be some dollar. You're going to spend 50 bucks, a hundred bucks to be able to get this research, but it gives you so much great starting point as you set up your store on Amazon for you to be able to sell more merchandise, right?

Jeremy Neisser (16:41.71)
But I would 100 % start with more city-forward, state-forward apparel just to get some momentum. starting with those city-based designs, state-pride apparel, those types of things, and more of a broader baseball identity or a hockey identity, like, that's gonna build velocity, that's gonna get you some reviews early on some of your items and getting you ranking higher.

That's when after you kind of get those things started first, then you're going to do your more team branded stuff because then Amazon's going to reward you with click through rates, higher conversion rates, and even more sales velocity velocity. So one important point that I'm pointing out here is without velocity, you're not getting any visibility without any visibility, no sales. So if you're on the second page on Amazon for specific keywords, like you're just not going to make any sales like

pretty simple there. this piece is really important here and I'm going to do that takeaway just for this piece here. Start with your city based designs, your state pride apparel and broader sport identity gear. So that's what I would start with. And I touched on SEO side of in this kind of the last segment here. I want to go

a little bit deeper on a thing called semantic SEO. Semantic SEO is pretty interesting here. Amazon is really keyword driven. So if you were typing in isotopes hat, you're selling a Albuquerque baseball hat. You're selling a maybe a brown baseball cap. You're selling a minor league baseball gift. You're selling a retro baseball apparel. You're selling a lot of different things here.

Semantics SEO. Let me give this to you in another simpler term. Think about barbecue gloves. Barbecue could be spelled out like barbecue actually spelled out or it could be B-A-R-B-Q gloves. So it's two different things. Another example is a trash can and a garbage can. It's the same thing, but it's called two different things. That is called semantic SEO. And that right there tells you that

Jeremy Neisser (19:09.464)
Like your listings need to show up for multiple things as you're getting them prepared. So you've got to have an optimized title, key rich bullet points, backfilled keyword fields, proper category selection, multiple images. Amazon's going to rank you on relevance and performance.

So your traffic from Shopify comes from your email, your ads, your social, right? Typically your Shopify traffic comes from the work that you're doing. Amazon's traffic comes from search intent. If I'm typing in garbage can inside of Amazon, it's going to show me trash cans, garbage cans, trash pails, garbage pails. It's going to show me a whole lot of different things. That is called semantic SEO.

And that's the piece here about SEO that you're really going to have to think through as you're putting your content on Amazon to sell because there are so many other avenues and directions that people are going to get to your merchandise because it's all about search on Amazon and on your Shopify store. It's the momentum that you're creating. You're sending out emails, posting on social media and what have you.

Can you connect Shopify to Amazon? Operationally, yes. You can connect your Shopify store to Amazon. Inside of Shopify, they have this connector app called Marketplace Connect. It allows inventory syncing, order syncing, centralized management. I will link the official Shopify Marketplace Connect in the show notes here so you can see exactly how it works.

So if you're serious about selling on Amazon, you're going to need to review Amazon seller university, the official kind of getting started and fulfilled by merchandise merchant requirements, because you're going to be fulfilling it, not sending it off to Amazon to let them do. This is not just the wing it type thing. Shut setting up Shopify was like a learning curve for teams like

Jeremy Neisser (21:22.53)
This is going to be an off season project for a lot of teams because it's going to take some time just to kind of get things set up because you're learning something that you have never learned before. Number one, how Amazon works is a search platform and how you're posting things to it to sell. Number two, you're going to have to learn about the SEO side of things and what items we're going to start with and how we're going to create some momentum. Cause remember

Amazon we and you and me we look at reviews on items. We got to get reviews. How do we do that? Right? One thing I would caution you on is don't move your entire catalog over there at once Right move on over evergreen items giftable items the broad market products that are like city-based state-based those types of things Keep Shopify for your limited items. Even your your player related things if you're selling bobbleheads on there

premium collections any of those types and things right kind of protect What's living in your Shopify store and what's living on Amazon? Align the pricing if Amazon undercuts Shopify you will train your fans to leave your Ecosystem match the pricing or charge more on Amazon. That's what I would tell you Model the margin before you list things out inside of Amazon seller central

And there are other tools and I'll put a link in the show notes that tells you exactly what your profit will be. So that'll give you a really good idea of what you should be pricing your item for so that you're getting a profit and you're not literally cutting off your nose to make a profit here, right? So I would use some of these tools to understand what you're getting into first, right?

And then the second piece, and I mentioned this already, but I would say that you should probably charge a little bit more on Amazon simply because they're taking 15 % right off the top. Treat Amazon as an acquisition strategy here. There are really three levels of growth here to increase your order average value, increase, re repeat purchase rates. So getting people to buy more or go get new customers.

Jeremy Neisser (23:41.12)
That's the only way you're going to sell more merchandise. You're selling more to people. You're going to sell more at the purchase. So instead of buying $35, they buy 50. So you're trying to increase that ordered value. You're trying to get people to buy multiple items multiple times during the year, or you just go out and find new customers. Those are the only three ways you can sell more merchandise.

Amazon 100 % will help you with new customer acquisition. Your Shopify fuel, all the things that you're doing in Shopify, that fuels number one, your average order value and your repeat purchase rate. If Amazon is cutting into your average order values on Shopify or they're cutting into your repeat purchases, then you're trading long-term value for short-term revenue. So there's definitely some good and bad here.

Holy moly, there's a lot to take in. Amazon is such an amazing platform for you to be able to sell merchandise on. It's not good, and it's not bad. It's great for a lot of things. It's hard and rough and bumpy for others. It's a tool. The wrong way to approach it is emotionally. I need to sell XYZ on Amazon to do what have you, right? Like, that's not how you should be thinking about it. You should be thinking about it as Amazon

is a strategic channel that allows me to get my merchandise in front of more people and I can move more merchandise right can Amazon help us acquire new customers without weakening the relationship that we've built on Shopify if the answer is yes the margin that you've kind of figured out and the cannibalization can be controlled but you just need to figure out

what you're selling on one platform, what you're selling on other, what your price points on one are, what your price points on the other are, all of those things, right? You need to 100 % protect what you have already built on your merchandise with Shopify and all of the processes that you have. If you are considering selling on Amazon and you want to have a deeper conversation, like I am 100 % happy to hop on a call.

Jeremy Neisser (25:56.778)
and help you kind of talk through this and what this would all look like. I'm gonna put a boatload of links in the show notes for you to be able to kind of click through and learn. But this is such a unique idea for teams that I haven't seen teams tackle yet. Not even at the major league level. Some of the teams that are selling millions and millions of dollars of merchandise have not decided they wanted to do this because they feel like it would cannibalize them. But if you're a

You're the only team in a community and you know that you're going to be able to create some momentum. This is such a marvelous branding opportunity for you, but there are some trade-offs, some pros and some cons. But like I said, if you're interested in having a deeper conversation about selling on Amazon, feel free to head on over to sportsmarketingmachine.com schedule a call, happy to chat through it with you.

really unpack if this totally makes sense for you or not. If you found this episode helpful, feel free to share it with someone who's just like you, someone who's working in sports trying to sell more tickets, sell more merchandise and grow their fan base. I appreciate your time and I look forward to talking to you next time.