Amazon and Faire are both legitimate growth channels for consumer brands, and they're also almost completely different businesses. One is a direct-to-consumer marketplace where you compete on search rank and ad spend. The other is a wholesale marketplace where independent retailers are your customers, and word-of-mouth between buyers does a lot of the selling for you. Choosing between them, or figuring out how to run both well, requires understanding what each one is actually good for.
This isn't a "which is better" post. There's no universal answer. But there is a right answer for your brand at this stage of your growth, and this post is designed to help you find it.
What Amazon Is Good For
Amazon is the default first stop for most consumer product searches in the United States. If someone knows they want a product and they're ready to buy it, there's a good chance they're starting on Amazon. That purchase intent is the platform's most valuable asset, and it's why Amazon can generate meaningful revenue quickly for brands with strong product-market fit.
Amazon is also good for building brand awareness at scale. Even customers who don't buy on Amazon often check Amazon reviews before buying elsewhere. Your presence there, and the quality of your reviews, influences purchasing decisions across every other channel you sell on. That's a secondary benefit most brands don't fully account for when they're evaluating whether Amazon is worth it.
The tradeoffs are real, though. Amazon takes a significant cut of every sale. Advertising is essentially required to build visibility, and ad costs have increased substantially over the past several years. And Amazon owns the customer relationship: you get the order, but you don't get the email address or the ability to follow up. Our Amazon channel management work is built around maximizing what you can control on the platform given those constraints.
What Faire Is Good For
Faire is a wholesale marketplace, which means your customers are retailers, not end consumers. A single Faire order might represent 10 or 20 units of a product going to a boutique in Austin or a gift shop in Portland. That retailer then puts your product on their shelves, tells their customers about it, and ideally reorders when they sell through.
The economics of wholesale are different from DTC in ways that matter. Your margins per unit are lower because you're selling at wholesale pricing. But your average order value is much higher, and the lifetime value of a good retail account compounds over time in a way that individual Amazon orders don't. A retailer who reorders four times a year at $300 per order is worth more than the math suggests, because they're also putting your product in front of customers who've never searched for it.
Faire is also good for brand building in a way that Amazon isn't. Independent retailers tend to carry brands they genuinely believe in, and their customers trust their curation. Getting into the right retail accounts does something for your brand perception that a good Amazon listing can't replicate.
The Key Differences That Drive the Decision
The most important variable is your product's margin structure. Wholesale pricing typically means selling at 50% of MSRP, sometimes less. If your landed cost is too high relative to your retail price, wholesale won't work regardless of how much you want it to. Amazon can be more forgiving on margins, especially for brands with high conversion rates and low advertising costs.
Channel fit matters too. Amazon skews toward products that solve a specific problem and can be found through keyword search. Faire skews toward products that have visual appeal, gift potential, or a compelling brand story that a retailer can tell to their customers. Some products are natural fits for both. Some are clearly better suited to one or the other.
Your operational capacity is another real factor. Amazon requires active management: listings, advertising, account health, FBA coordination. Faire requires reliable fulfillment and responsive communication with buyers. Neither is low-effort, but they require different kinds of attention. Brands that try to run both channels without adequate bandwidth for either tend to underperform on both.
Running Both Channels Well
Most established consumer brands end up on both channels, and that's the right answer for most products with strong margins and broad appeal. The mistake is treating them as the same business with different storefronts. They're not. Your pricing strategy, your content, your customer service model, and your growth levers are all different.
The brands that run both well tend to be deliberate about sequencing. They usually build one channel to a point of stability before investing heavily in the other, rather than trying to scale both simultaneously on limited resources. Which channel to build first depends on the product, the margins, and where your existing customer relationships are strongest.
If you're trying to work out whether to prioritize Amazon, Faire, or both, and what a realistic growth plan looks like for your specific product and margin structure, schedule a call with us. We work across both channels and can give you a straightforward read on where your brand is likely to get the most traction first.
To dig deeper into wholesale specifically, visit our Faire marketplace management page. For a broader look at whether Faire is the right fit for your brand at all, read What Is Faire and Is It Right for Your Brand? When you're ready to build a channel strategy, our Faire marketplace management team is a good starting point.