Webshop development
A webshop that can handle your prices, your customers and your stock — not a fashion retailer’s.
Read more →Selling through a marketplace or your own webshop?
A marketplace gives you customers you would never have reached, and then keeps them. That is the whole trade-off in one sentence.
The short version
Marketplaces have something you do not: millions of people already there. If you are starting out, that is the fastest route to the first orders and you barely have to build anything. The price is a commission per sale, usually between ten and twenty per cent, and the fact that the customer stays the marketplace’s customer rather than yours.
Your own webshop costs money before it earns any and requires you to find visitors yourself. In exchange you keep the full margin, know who your customers are, can approach them again, and build your own brand instead of somebody else’s.
Start on a marketplace if
- You do not yet know whether there is demand for what you sell.
- Your products compare well on price and specification.
- You have no budget or time to attract visitors yourself.
- It is an addition alongside your existing sales.
Build your own webshop if
- Your margin cannot carry a marketplace commission.
- Repeat purchases are a significant part of your revenue.
- You sell business to business with per-customer terms — a marketplace cannot do that.
- Your product needs explanation that does not fit a marketplace listing.
- You are building a brand that has to be more than the cheapest result.
What gets overlooked here
The trade-off is usually presented as a choice and it rarely is. Most businesses that do this well use the marketplace as a shop window and their own shop as the shop: new customers arrive through the platform, and everything in the parcel points at your own shop for the next order.
What matters then is that your own shop genuinely has to be better than the marketplace page. Faster, clearer, with information that is not there. An own webshop that is worse than your marketplace listing gives customers no reason to switch.
Once you have decided
Shopify vs WooCommerce
Shopify is a subscription you rent a shop in. WooCommerce is software you run yourself. Nearly every difference comes back to that.
Read more →Off-the-shelf or custom
There is almost always a package that handles eighty per cent of your process. The question is what the last twenty per cent costs you.
Read more →WordPress vs custom
WordPress runs roughly four in ten websites. That is neither coincidence nor recommendation — it depends entirely on what the site has to do.
Read more →Frequently asked questions
May I advertise my own shop inside the parcel?
Rules differ per marketplace and change, so read your terms. A branded insert with a discount code for a repeat purchase is generally the most accepted form.
Will my own shop cannibalise my marketplace sales?
In practice barely. They are partly different customers, and anybody who already knows you would rather buy direct — which is exactly the shift you want.
What if I mostly sell business to business?
Then a marketplace is rarely the answer. Per-customer pricing, ordering on account and order lists do not exist there, and those are the core of trade selling.
Not sure which way to go?
Send a short brief with what you have now and what needs to be better. You get an honest answer, including if that answer is that you do not need us for it.