The Relationship Isn’t Yours. It’s the Platform’s.
I was reading something this morning about AI companies fighting over who gets to keep the six months of context they’ve built on you — how you write, what you know, every question you’ve ever asked them — and it hit me that every independent retailer I know is living that same story and doesn’t realize it.
You think you have a customer list because you’ve rung up 3,000 orders through your Shopify store. You don’t. Shopify does. You think the search traffic finding your store is yours. Google owns it.
And you think you have a brand relationship with that line you’ve ordered on Faire for two years. Faire has it. The brand can send you a message — but only through Faire’s platform. They can’t get your email. They can’t buy it. Two years of your orders and the maker of your favorite product still has to route every word through a gatekeeper. That’s not a bug. That’s the business model.
And the day the platform raises fees or changes the algorithm that’s been sending you reorders, you find out what you actually own — which is whatever’s on the email list you built yourself, on the website you host yourself, on the customer relationships you’ve built by walking out from behind your own counter.
The stores still standing five years from now will be the ones who stopped renting the relationship and started owning it. That knowing is yours. Nobody can take it.
xoxo, ❤️ AmyFay
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