Amazon Dependency: When Your Best Sales Channel Becomes Your Biggest Risk

Amazon can be an extraordinary sales channel. That is exactly why dependence on it becomes dangerous once it passes a certain point.

The problem does not appear when Amazon sales are weak. It appears when the platform becomes highly successful inside the business: most revenue comes from it, customers are there, advertising is there, and inventory and operations have been built around it.

At that stage, the useful question is no longer simply, “How much are we selling on Amazon?” It becomes: what happens to the business if the economics of Amazon change?

The experiences of Gusti Leder and Ortlieb offer two very different answers to the same strategic question.

Gusti Leder: 90% of sales can turn success into concentration risk

At one point in Gusti Leder’s growth, Amazon accounted for roughly 90% of the company’s sales. On revenue alone, that level of marketplace success looks difficult to argue with.

But revenue concentration changes the risk profile of a business. Founder Christian Pietsch described mounting costs around storage, returns, support and advertising while profitability from the Amazon channel weakened despite substantial sales.

That is the point at which “dependency” becomes more than a revenue-share statistic. If one channel produces most of the sales while becoming more expensive to operate and harder to replace, the company can look large while becoming less resilient.

The problem is not that Amazon sells a lot. The problem is that the alternative is weak

A large channel is not automatically a problem. Dependence begins when the company has no credible alternative if fees, visibility, advertising economics or platform terms change.

When 90% of demand comes from one place, a change in that place can affect the entire company. As dependence deepens, other channels can weaken further: the direct store remains underdeveloped, distributors become less important, and customers learn to look for the brand on Amazon rather than through channels the brand controls more directly.

That changes bargaining power.

The company is no longer negotiating from a position with meaningful alternatives. It is negotiating while knowing that a large share of its revenue passes through the same gate.

34 physical stores: Gusti Leder builds an exit from dependency

Pietsch’s response was not to shut down Amazon overnight. Gusti Leder built another channel: 34 physical retail stores across Germany.

The result he described was striking. One physical store came to generate more net profit than the company’s entire Amazon sales channel.

The lesson is not that physical retail is universally better than e-commerce. It is that channel economics can differ radically. In Gusti Leder’s own stores, a range of Amazon fees and commissions disappeared, and the company regained more control over the customer relationship.

For Gusti Leder, diversification was not a branding exercise. It was a profitability and bargaining-power strategy.

Ortlieb: the dependency it chose to avoid before it began

Ortlieb took a different path. The German premium bicycle-bag brand did not build a business around Amazon and then try to escape it. It chose to keep official distribution within a selected network of specialist retailers and distributors.

The importance of Ortlieb here is not its legal dispute or the gray-market issue. It is the company’s channel philosophy: Ortlieb wanted to preserve greater control over where the product was sold, who represented it and how the customer experience was handled.

That illustrates an important point about diversification. It does not always mean adding more platforms. Sometimes it means refusing a huge channel before it becomes the center of the business.

How do you know Amazon has shifted from channel to dependency?

Revenue share is an important signal, but it is not the only one. Dependency also appears when Amazon starts determining what the business can realistically do outside Amazon.

Warning signs can include:

• The business cannot absorb a sudden decline in marketplace visibility.
• Advertising spend keeps rising simply to maintain existing sales volume.
• There is no alternative channel capable of absorbing inventory or demand.
• A lower price on the direct store feels risky because of its possible effect on Amazon performance.
• Revenue grows while net profit remains weak.

The common factor is a loss of flexibility.

Revenue share is not profit share

One of the most important lessons from Gusti Leder is the need to separate share of revenue from share of profit.

A channel can generate most of a company’s sales without generating most of its economic value. As fees, advertising, returns and storage costs accumulate, the number at the top of the income statement matters less than what remains at the bottom.

That is why a statement such as “Amazon represents 60% of our sales” is not enough to evaluate the channel.

A better commercial question is: how much profit comes from Amazon, and how much strategic freedom are we giving up in exchange for it?

Real diversification requires a channel that actually works

Opening a website does not mean a company has diversified. One weak distributor does not create a meaningful fallback.

Diversification becomes real when another channel can generate enough demand and profit to change how the company behaves.

Gusti Leder reached that point through physical stores. Ortlieb built it through a specialist distribution network. The models are different, but the strategic result is similar: greater ability to make decisions that are not dictated by one platform.

Why this matters before the problem becomes urgent

The worst time to build an alternative channel is after the company suddenly needs one.

Once a business becomes deeply dependent on Amazon, shifting demand after a fee increase or visibility decline is much harder. Customers, operations and internal habits have already been built around the platform.

Channel diversification is therefore not an “exit Amazon” plan. It is strategic insurance against allowing your best sales channel to become the only channel you cannot afford to lose.

FAQ

Does Amazon dependency mean a company should leave the platform?

No. The point is not automatic exit. It is preventing any one channel from becoming so dominant that the business loses alternatives and bargaining power.

Why are high Amazon sales not enough to judge the channel?

Because advertising, marketplace fees and operating costs can make profitability far weaker than revenue suggests. Gusti Leder’s experience shows the difference clearly.

What does sales-channel diversification actually mean?

It means building other channels that can genuinely generate demand and profit — such as direct sales, distributors or physical retail — so the business is not dependent on a single source of sales.