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Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish.

It's a dilemma facing more and more brands nowadays. Should you sell your goods on Amazon? At

first glance, the answer has to be yes, right? Amazon is the most visited e-commerce platform

in the United States. Two-thirds of US customers start their product search on Amazon. Plus,

it's the dominant retailer in 28 other countries. It grew so big thanks to its fulfillment speed

and quality of the buying experience, how can you say no to that kind of reach? Turns

out there are a lot of reasons. There's costs, there's more competition, even from Amazon

itself, and then there's the data and feedback from customers you give up by not selling directly.

What is a brand to do? Well, our guest today is here to help businesses that are struggling

with that decision. A yell at Israeli is an associate professor at Harvard Business School.

Together with her HBS colleagues Leonard Schlesinger and Matt Higgins, as well as consultant

Sabir Semmerkont, she wrote the HBR article showed your company sell on Amazon.

I yell it. How are you? Thanks for coming on the show. I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.

Now, you write in your article that quote, every brand should consider selling on Amazon. Why?

In the decade or so that I've been researching retail, everyone mentions Amazon at some point.

In the earlier days, companies basically had a yes or no very clear cut strategy.

And nowadays, we hear more about what is your Amazon strategy rather than should you be on Amazon

or not? Amazon is just so huge. I think the latest estimates I've seen is that roughly 40% of

all online retail in the US is on Amazon. So it's quite large. And then we've seen in recent

...