Reclaiming Product Visibility from a Third-Party Storefront

At a Glance

The Situation

The client is an independent bakery selling products both through their own e-commerce shop and through a third-party storefront on Amazon. Both routes carried the same products, but the Amazon listings consistently outranked the bakery's own product pages on Google Shopping.

The commercial impact was straightforward. Customers searching for the bakery's products saw the Amazon listing first, bought through Amazon, and the bakery paid the marketplace cut on every sale. The direct shop, with better margin and a direct customer relationship, was sitting right there but invisible at the point of purchase.

What We Found

A diagnostic review of the site, the Shopping setup, and the way the products were presented to Google surfaced the underlying issues. The Amazon listings benefitted from Amazon's domain authority and the strength of their Merchant Center setup. The bakery's own product pages were technically sound but were sending Google a weaker, less complete set of signals about what the products were and why they should be shown.

The fix was less about ranking-factor tactics and more about presenting the product information cleanly enough that Google would treat the direct shop as the canonical source for those products in Shopping results.

What We Did

The work focused on the bakery's direct shop rather than trying to compete with Amazon on its own terms. We restructured how product pages presented information to Google Shopping, tightened the merchant signals being sent, and worked through the indexation and structured data on the direct shop so that Google had a clearer reason to surface the bakery's own listing rather than the third-party version.

The Result

Direct sales through the bakery's own shop increased by around 30% within three months of the changes going live. The work paid for itself comfortably inside the first quarter, and the gain was structural rather than promotional, meaning the increased direct revenue continued in the months that followed without ongoing spend.

Importantly, the Amazon channel was not cannibalised. Customers who specifically wanted to buy through Amazon still did. What changed was the proportion of customers who, given a choice, ended up on the bakery's own site instead.

Key Takeaway

For any business selling products both directly and through a marketplace storefront, the marketplace can quietly cannibalise direct sales unless the product information on the direct site is set up specifically to compete in Google Shopping. The work is technical rather than promotional, and the payback often comes faster than equivalent investment in advertising.