Most marketplace advice is about getting more out of Amazon. Far less is said about what happens when Amazon quietly becomes too much of your business. On an episode of MerchantSpring Marketplace Masters, Daniel Pierce, founder of the growth agency Spry Tribe and a veteran of sports nutrition, DTC and TikTok Shop, made the case for revenue balance: as classic risk mitigation, he argues, no single channel should sit above about 20% of net revenue. The trouble is that Amazon is easy to grow on, so it drifts out of balance, and brands that let it discover the risk the hard way.
What Healthy Balance Actually Looks Like
Pierce learned this before the pandemic, watching over-exposed clients hit a wall, then watched some Amazon seller and vendor accounts drop 40 to 50% almost overnight when inbound inventory seized up. In sports nutrition there's a second trigger: a hot product can suddenly face new regulatory or ingredient-testing requirements, so single-channel dependence is doubly dangerous. Both are arguments for a real DTC platform and genuine channel diversity.
The healthy ratio depends on the brand's stage. Pierce describes taking a formerly Amazon-reliant supplement brand and setting a goal of a 1:1 DTC-to-Amazon split within six months, which they hit and then exceeded, though it took heavy engineering across advertising, merchandising and innovation. He's candid that 1:1 is aspirational, because it is simply easier to grow on Amazon than on DTC for a startup or a sub-$25M brand that lacks the operational infrastructure for rapid direct growth. For more established brands his rule of thumb is no worse than 4:1. Beyond that, he warns, Amazon starts to take over your brand, absorbing the search and discovery gravity while you quietly fail to build the infrastructure you'll eventually need to own.
Build What Amazon Can't
To rebalance, Pierce works two levers: easing Amazon's dominance and accelerating DTC. The first framework he sets up he calls WACD, 'What Amazon Can't Do', a deliberate list of brand features Amazon can't compete with, and the biggest one is loyalty. You can't beat Amazon's purchasing flywheel or its card-linked rewards, so you don't try; instead, you map the customer journey through your own DTC purchase cycle, where the Shopify ecosystem lets you build loyalty and lifecycle mechanics in a detail Amazon will never allow, and design a loyalty system that beats Amazon on the dimensions you control.
This is really a lifetime-value argument. Amazon offers an enviable cost to acquire a new customer; Pierce puts it at 50 to 60% below DTC, but the LTV that follows tends to be shorter, and DTC LTV is generally higher. The catch is that you can't track LTV through Amazon's own platform, so you need analytics that let you compare it channel by channel; do that honestly, he says, and the contrast between a cheap-to-acquire, short-lived Amazon customer and a costlier, longer-lived DTC one becomes stark (MerchantSpring has written on the Amazon-plus-DTC halo effect).
How to Accelerate DTC
On the growth side, Pierce leads with innovation-pipeline and test-and-learn management. You don't have to scale every new product to Amazon first; you can test with your best customer cohorts on DTC, building loyalty through VIP access along the way. Portfolio management is the tangible version of this: a sports-nutrition brand might keep only its six core flavours on Amazon while running seasonal and experimental flavours off-Amazon, concentrating its new-product and advertising gravity on the direct channel.
The rest is retention and data. Lifecycle management, through email and SMS, is far easier to do well on DTC, letting you control acquisition, retention and reacquisition deliberately. And journey mapping, the first-to-second-order and second-to-third-order drop-offs, the true churn picture, is something Amazon simply won't give you at a one-to-one customer level. Owning that data is a large part of what makes a direct channel worth the effort.
Is Amazon Still a Discovery Engine?
Pierce's answer is yes and no. Some large DTC brands have proven they don't need Amazon at all, and there's still a distinct Amazon-shopper persona, backed by fulfilment so fast it now competes with the Instacarts and DoorDashes of the world. But he's blunt that Amazon's role as a discovery engine is shrinking. A meaningful and often-underestimated share of TikTok's audience is over 40, so the generational picture of where products get discovered is shifting, and answer engines and large language models are increasingly shaping how people find brands.
Crucially, Amazon has walled itself off from exactly those engines: it has blocked OpenAI's ChatGPT crawlers and, by late 2025, dozens of AI bots via its robots.txt, keeping its product pages, prices and reviews out of AI shopping answers, largely to protect the roughly $56 billion advertising business that depends on people browsing Amazon.com (eMarketer). Once a shopper is on Amazon, tools like Rufus are formidable; the problem, Pierce argues, is getting them there when discovery is migrating to platforms Amazon has chosen to hide from. His own teenagers, he notes, discover products on TikTok and ChatGPT and transact on the spot in TikTok Shop.
TikTok Shop as the Discovery Engine
This is why Pierce treats TikTok Shop not as a profit centre but as a marketing and brand-discovery engine, often planned to run at break-even. For a startup, he'll set a net-revenue target of roughly 1:1 with Amazon while holding TikTok Shop at break-even, and the payoff shows up everywhere else: as he scales GMV Max ads, he sees acceleration on both Amazon and DTC, because the impressions lift every channel. It takes a large volume of creators and product sampling to train the algorithm for visibility, but once you know the benchmarks, moving from a few dozen to a couple of thousand shoppable videos with a thousand or more creators, the authentic user-generated content it produces is something Amazon's creator tools can't match, and it can be repurposed to feed Meta and YouTube advertising too.
His conclusion is direct: there are three core platforms any startup or late-stage brand should be working, DTC, Amazon and now TikTok Shop, and he'd put TikTok Shop in the same echelon as Amazon for pure brand discovery, in some cases ahead of it. For agencies weighing how to fold it in, MerchantSpring's guide on driving growth with TikTok is a useful starting point.
The Mistakes Brands Make
The biggest error, Pierce says, is not understanding your data and the ecosystem you compete in. A coffee brand running Amazon PPC is fighting Starbucks and Monster for the same clicks, while the same category may be wide open on TikTok, so know your competitive landscape and where your acquisition cost is genuinely lowest before you commit the budget. For established brands, the trap is missing where attention is actually moving: creatine, for instance, has been booming on Amazon while accelerating even faster on TikTok, much of it driven by a handful of brands, and a category can shift under you while you're watching the wrong dashboard. Legacy brands, he cautions, lean too heavily on traditional syndicated retail data (SPINS, Circana) and overlook what dedicated TikTok Shop analytics tools reveal about the same categories.
Two blind spots compound it. One is demographic: the US buyer base has diversified, and a large, fast-growing Latino audience is easier to reach in-language on TikTok than on Amazon. The other is generational: executives in their forties and up who hear about TikTok Shop but haven't felt its impact, and who keep pouring PPC into a discovery motion that has moved to YouTube, TikTok and social. Pierce's remedy is unglamorous: get on the platform yourself (or ask your teenagers), let the algorithm teach you, and take a sober look at where your brand discovery is actually happening before you decide where the next dollar goes.
See Your Revenue Balance Across Every Channel
Pierce's whole case rests on seeing the picture across channels, revenue mix, acquisition cost and lifetime value, which is exactly what he uses MerchantSpring for, since Amazon won't show you LTV on its own. MerchantSpring brings Amazon, DTC, TikTok Shop and your other channels into one view, with profitability and lifetime-value analytics, so you can tell whether any single channel has crept past a healthy share and act before it becomes a risk. See it on your own accounts with a walkthrough of your data.
