[only_as_i_fall]

And then you get far less traffic than you would if your product was listed on Amazon.

In the traditional brick and mortar situation you can open your own shop next to the Walmart or Target or whatever and have roughly the same visibility. In the online space though rolling your own shopify store is a massive handicap similar to if you weren't allowed to build within 5 miles of a large box store for fear of competition.

A huge number of people literally only shop on Amazon or at least look at Amazon before other locations because they believe it to be representative of the marketplace at large. Maybe that's their loss, but when you also consider Amazon's huge logistics network that nobody else is allowed to use.