Whether you’re just starting out or have been selling online, there comes a time when you wonder if you are truly using the best approach to sell your products. Should you sell on your own website or opt to sell on marketplaces?
Let’s dive into your options, and see how your own store compliments a marketplace listing.
Marketplaces
Community sites like Etsy, eBay, Amazon, and even iTunes for musicians are sites I like to call “shopping malls”. For those starting out, they’re great at getting you the exposure you need to make sales, but you will reach a point in your business when this is simply not cutting it. Let’s take Etsy as an example. They’ve created a great community of buyers and sellers of unique handmade crafts. The business model allows you to list a product for a small fee and they take a cut of the transaction fee. The numbers add up to a profitable beginning and a small price to pay to get those sales. But when should you consider setting up your own cart? And should you abandon the community altogether or simply complement it with your own store? Let’s take a look at some variables.
Your Traffic
Let’s assume you have a blog or a website, and you’ve been working hard on increasing your traffic. Your site visits are steadily growing, and now your most exited page is the page with the link to your marketplace. This link is doing it’s job sending your potential customer to the marketplace to make the purchase, but a business minded person would have to stop and think on how to optimize profit and keep a well branded experience. So ask yourself:
- Would you have made more if you captured that buy and sold the deal on your site directly? After all they are on your own site and interested in buying.
- How much traffic are you sending to these marketplaces, and compare that to the traffic you get from the marketplace?
- Did you reach a point where you’re sending these marketplaces potential leads?
Get your calculator, login to Google Analytics, study your numbers and find out.
Your Money
Traffic is your number one aim and next is finances, in close second. When was the last time you calculated your total orders, commissions paid, and profit gained? The number you really want to look at is the commission paid. Most shopping carts are free to start with and can average out to a $20 per month flat fee, plus the payment gateway commission of around 3%. Marketplaces take an average of 30% plus the payment gateway fee. So there you go, whip out your calculator and do the math again.
Your Own Store
Ecommerce has advanced in the past few years and solutions out there like Wazala have become more affordable and pretty easy to use. They allow you to design your store visually to match your brand with no coding so you can manage every aspect. Delivering a consistent brand image offers customers a feeling of trustworthiness and helps you position yourself in your industry, but apart from the physical, there are other positive attributes:
SEO – Listing your products for sale on your own website help you get more search traffic and builds your page ranking. The ultimate goal is to reach position 1 in Google search for a specific term, and this search should link to your own website, or else you wasted marketing efforts to build someone else’s business.
Sell Anything – With your own store, you’re not limited to selling just handmade’s, or just music. iTuners is great to launch your new CD, but you’re left with no place to sell merch and tickets. Wazala allows you to sell anything.
Sell Anywhere – Having your own Wazala online store means you can sell to customers anywhere they find you. If they land on your blog, Facebook page or your website they can browse and pay right there. No need to direct them anywhere else, especially a marketplace where they can get lost browsing other merchants products.
Payment Gateways – While marketplaces may limit your payment gateway options, with your own ecommerce website you can integrate many and allow the customer to choose the method of payment. 7% of customers leave the site if their preferred method is not available.
Direct Purchase / No membership – Statistics show that 14% of customers abandon a shopping cart if there is no guest checkout or if they had to sign up. Allowing them to buy without creating an account does increase conversions.
No Distractions – A mysterious, but important point, that you probably will never know, is the number of customers you lost when they get distracted by other merchants in the marketplace. Yeah sure a marketplace is a community of people working together to help push sales, but they are your competitors and they are a single click away! On your own site analytics and cart abandonment are all yours to see, and there for you to track progress.
There are many pros to owning your own store, so adding an ecommerce site, and investing early will only allow you to build a more solid brand. Think of your online store as a complement to marketplaces and not just a substitute, and once you have solid numbers to work with, the pros and cons will be much clearer.
Happy Selling!
