"Stop thinking of your brand as an 'Amazon brand'" — a positioning Alvaro Lopez (Flooret) says was viable five-plus years ago but is no longer viable on its own. Instead, meet the customer on whichever channel they already prefer to buy from: owned site (Shopify/DTC), Amazon, big-box retail (e.g. Home Depot), independent retail, and commercial/B2B — rather than optimizing a single channel in isolation.
The strategic anchor stays the brand's own direct-to-consumer site, even when the majority of current revenue still comes from a marketplace like Amazon. Owning the direct customer relationship (first-party data, email/SMS, lifetime value tracking) is treated as more durable than marketplace-only traffic, and is the reason a brand should build its own site early rather than treat a marketplace as the whole business.
Practical entry point given for founders early on this path: it has never been easier to spin up a basic Shopify storefront plus an email/SMS acquisition program (e.g. Klaviyo) with AI tooling doing much of the setup work — the advice is to just start rather than over-plan the channel mix.
Applied at scale, this strategy becomes a structured expansion plan (see Three-Pillar DTC Growth Framework (Product, Channel, Funnel)) and requires guarding premium brand positioning when entering a cheaper channel segment (see Differentiation vs. Race-to-the-Bottom).
Flooret frames this as its channel pillar: rather than staying a single-channel 'Amazon brand' or 'DTC brand', it expands to Home Depot, Amazon, independent retail, and commercial channels — wherever flooring buyers already prefer to shop. New channels are tested starting with low or no ad spend (e.g. homedepot.com) to confirm organic customer demand before investing further. Quote: 'If you don't have a strategy on Amazon, your customers will still shop there, and someone else will get it.'
Traffic into the different channels comes from a deliberately split paid stack: Amazon PPC drives on-platform discovery (see Amazon PPC Auction Model), while paid search and paid social are pointed at the brand's own site and other owned destinations. Alvaro Lopez (Flooret) frames Amazon itself as "the true bottom of funnel" — see Amazon as the True Bottom of Funnel — which is why on-platform spend and off-platform demand-generation spend are allocated to different jobs rather than treated as one undifferentiated acquisition budget.
Apply: don't run one blended acquisition budget across channels — use Amazon PPC for on-platform discovery/conversion and paid search/social to build demand and traffic toward owned and other channels.
An Amazon private-label seller (100M+ lifetime sales) is extending a top-selling magnesium spray into 900+ physical Walmart stores. He built roughly 6 months of retail inventory ahead of launch, treating it as a sunk cost rather than a hurdle, and used Retail-Exclusive SKU Sizing to keep the in-store SKU distinct from the online listing so the two channels don't collide on price or Buy Box eligibility.