One of the most important Amazon decisions most vendors never make is deciding what role Amazon should play in the business.
At first glance, that may seem like an odd statement. Most companies spend considerable time discussing Amazon. They review performance, debate investments, evaluate opportunities, and respond to challenges. Entire meetings are dedicated to Amazon. Dashboards are built around Amazon. Significant resources are allocated to Amazon.
Yet despite all of that attention, many organizations never pause to answer a surprisingly simple question.
The absence of that answer creates consequences that extend far beyond strategy discussions. It influences how resources are allocated, how opportunities are evaluated, how success is measured, and ultimately how decisions are made. When an organization lacks clarity about the role Amazon is supposed to play, it often struggles to establish priorities. Decisions become more difficult because there is no agreed-upon objective against which those decisions can be evaluated.
Over time, this uncertainty tends to manifest itself in a variety of ways. Some organizations become trapped in cycles of indecision. Others pursue initiatives that fail to produce meaningful results. Some struggle with stagnation despite significant effort and investment. Others find themselves constantly shifting priorities as different stakeholders advocate for different directions. What appears to be an execution problem is often a strategy problem hiding beneath the surface.
The underlying issue is not a lack of information. Most organizations have access to far more information than they can reasonably act upon. The issue is that they never established strategic intent. Many of the Amazon decisions companies wrestle with are actually downstream from that missing clarity.
Questions such as whether to launch Direct Fulfillment, expand internationally, invest more heavily in advertising, broaden assortment, prioritize growth, or improve profitability are often treated as independent decisions. In reality, the answers depend heavily on what the organization is trying to accomplish through Amazon in the first place.
A company using Amazon primarily as a growth engine will naturally make different decisions than a company focused on profitability. A business treating Amazon as a strategic distribution channel may evaluate opportunities differently than one using Amazon primarily to support a broader omnichannel strategy. Neither approach is inherently right or wrong. The important distinction is that the objective influences the decision.
Without clarity around the objective, even reasonable decisions can feel disconnected. Teams may work hard, execute effectively, and make thoughtful recommendations, yet still struggle to generate momentum because individual decisions are not contributing toward a shared destination.
This is one reason I have become increasingly skeptical of universal Amazon advice. Recommendations are often presented as best practices when they are actually dependent on strategy. The right answer for one organization may be entirely wrong for another because the businesses are attempting to accomplish different things.
Another pattern I have observed is that Amazon frequently becomes strategically important before anyone deliberately decides what that importance should be.
Few organizations begin by declaring that Amazon should become one of the most influential channels in the business. They rarely set out with the intention of dedicating substantial leadership attention, operational resources, and organizational energy to Amazon. More often, the channel grows gradually. Revenue increases, opportunities expand, and new capabilities are required. Over time, Amazon occupies a larger and larger role within the organization until leadership eventually realizes that one of the company’s most important channels was never intentionally defined.
This is not necessarily a problem. Growth often creates opportunities that were difficult to anticipate. The problem occurs when Amazon’s importance grows faster than the organization’s clarity around why the channel exists and what it is expected to contribute.
When that happens, the channel begins influencing strategy rather than strategy guiding the channel. Decisions become increasingly reactive because the organization is responding to Amazon’s growth rather than evaluating that growth against a deliberate strategic objective.
Several years ago, I began noticing that some of the strongest vendor organizations could clearly articulate what Amazon was expected to contribute to the business. The answer varied from company to company, but the clarity was remarkably consistent. Leadership teams understood why they were investing in the channel, what outcomes they expected it to produce, and how Amazon fit within the broader organization.
That clarity often influenced much more than Amazon itself. Ownership became easier to define. Investment decisions became easier to justify. Performance discussions became more productive. Strategic opportunities could be evaluated in context rather than in isolation. When difficult tradeoffs emerged, leadership had a framework for determining which path was most consistent with the broader strategy.
Interestingly, many of these conversations emerged through my Channel Strategy Workshops. What often surprised leadership teams was not the complexity of the discussion but the realization that different stakeholders frequently held different assumptions about Amazon’s purpose. Once those assumptions became visible and a shared strategic direction was established, many decisions that had previously felt difficult became substantially easier. The workshop itself was rarely the source of the value. The value came from creating alignment around a question that had often gone unaddressed for years.
This pattern has repeated often enough that I no longer view channel strategy as a discussion about tactics. At its core, it is a discussion about purpose. Organizations that understand why Amazon exists within the business tend to make better decisions because those decisions are connected to a larger objective. Organizations that lack that clarity often find themselves evaluating opportunities one at a time without a consistent framework for determining which opportunities matter most.
Most companies spend a great deal of time deciding what to do on Amazon. Far fewer spend time deciding what Amazon is supposed to do for them.
In my experience, that decision deserves far more attention than it typically receives. Before an organization can determine how it should operate on Amazon, it should first determine why Amazon exists within the broader business strategy. Once that question is answered, many of the decisions that follow become considerably easier because they can be evaluated against a shared objective rather than a collection of competing assumptions.
The strongest organizations are rarely distinguished by having more information than everyone else. More often, they are distinguished by having greater clarity about what they are trying to accomplish. That clarity influences priorities, resource allocation, investment decisions, and ultimately performance itself.
Amazon can play many different roles within a business. The right role depends on the organization, its objectives, and the strategy it is trying to execute. What matters is not choosing the same answer as everyone else. What matters is choosing an answer intentionally and allowing that decision to guide everything that follows.
