If you have decided to go into the E-commerce business, there is one question you need to answer that will determine the nature of your online endeavors. Should I build an E-commerce website or sell my products on a marketplace website? It all depends on the direction you’d want to take your business to. If you wouldn’t like to spend time raising brand awareness, attracting buyers, and building trust, then the marketplace is the path to take. But if you want to build a unique brand and own your clients, the best option is to create an E-commerce website.
Marketplace vs. E-Commerce Shop
Both E-commerce sites and marketplace platforms serve the same purpose – to enable sellers to reach potential buyers and sell them their goods. However, there are some important differences between the two. On a marketplace website, thousands of sellers can market their products to customers. The platform allows third-party sellers to sell goods and invoice the buyers directly. The marketplace owners own the platform but not the inventory.
On the other hand, there’s the E-commerce site where a brand sells its own products. The website owner is also the owner of the inventory. He invoices the buyers, pays the value-added tax, and the entire site is customer-specific.
If You Want to Own Your Clients, You Need to Build Your Brand
Think about the last time you bought something on a marketplace (let’s say a phone charger from the seller registered as SmartphoneWizard on Amazon). If a friend asks you where you bought the charger, you will most likely tell them, “On Amazon,” instead of telling the exact name of the seller.
This means that you don’t own your marketplace clients, and people may never realize that you exist if that’s the only place you are selling. Online retailers looking to build a brand as well as trustful relationships with customers need to have an E-commerce site. Positioning yourself as a brand is much more challenging than getting yourself set up on Amazon.
Another benefit of “owning” your clients is the ability to retarget and segment audiences. Not every customer is ready to purchase straight away. On your E-commerce site, you can track what your site visitors were looking at, and then send personalized ads to remind them about what they were looking for. That is usually enough to make a sale.
As for the information that your customers provide in the registration form, nobody other than you can access it. You can use it to communicate relevant messages to them via multiple touchpoints, allowing them to communicate with you in their preferred way.
DG1 E-Commerce Shop
Technological advancements have brought so many tools that allow SMBs to stand shoulder to shoulder with industry giants. The possibility to build and manage your own online shop with ease and from a single dashboard will enable you to open the door to your brand to the whole world. With DG1, you can now launch your own shop and create an infinite variety of products to sell. Blog a powerful website with news, blogs, videos, stories, landing pages, and other types of content that will help you rank higher in SERPs. We also provide excellent tools for promotion, building brand awareness, and getting your customers’ attention. Our users have the opportunity to build their own database and communicate to their leads and contacts via direct mail, email, SMS, and push notifications.
Our all-in-one platform will help you own every bit of your data, providing a centralized system that enables you to operate your web presence. By building your brand entity that way, you will establish and foster trust with your customers, and make sure that they remember your brand’s name.
Tags: Marketplace, ecommerce, trustful relationships, retarget, segment audiences
