Online selling comes with so many benefits. Without the need of a physical storefront, you can sell at all times of the day, reach more customers than a regular brick and mortar shop, collect information about your buyers, analyze it, and use it to adjust your marketing efforts. However, there are different roads to take when it comes to the place to sell products online. The two most efficient and widespread options are online marketplaces and e-commerce websites.
Marketplace vs. E-Commerce Site – What’s Best for You?
Marketplace
A marketplace is a third-party website that includes product listings from sellers across many product categories. The most notable marketplace websites are eBay, Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, and Walmart.
Easy to get started
New sellers find it easier to get started and maintain their online stores on marketplace sites. They get an established infrastructure that saves the hassle and time of building a site from scratch. The payments and transactions are handled by the marketplace as well.
There are already people who buy there
People are comfortable making purchases on marketplaces as they are highly trusted and well-established sites. Sites like Amazon and eBay already have thousands of shoppers who are searching for products at any given moment.
Competition is also already there
Marketplaces are crowded, and many other brands are probably already offering products similar to yours. That makes things harder for your product to stand out from the crowd. If the competition is fierce in your product category, you’d need to work harder to get the sales or exposure you want.
Can’t build a customer list
Marketplaces don’t enable sellers to interact with customers outside the website, meaning that you can’t retarget customers to send them new product announcements, future promotions, and discount offers.
Can’t build brand awareness
The buying customer will most likely remember the marketplace instead of your brand because the focus is on the product, not on the seller. All that makes it more difficult to differentiate your business by building brand recognition and awareness.
E-Commerce site
E-commerce websites are built using e-commerce platforms and stand as independent sites where customers come to purchase products directly from a store belonging to a brand.
Ability to retarget buyers
The ability to get direct access to your customers is one of the greatest advantages of selling via your own e-commerce store. It enables more upsell possibilities and better customer service. You can target your website visitors with ads, market to past buyers, and remain connected with them.
Total control over your brand
With an e-commerce site, you’re in charge of what your online store will look like, work, and say. It allows you to show your brand personality because it doesn’t have to be boring and generic. Many e-commerce platforms offer integration with other systems, design, flexibility, and other options.
It takes time to set things up
With e-commerce platforms and interactive tools that enable you to set up and run your site, it has never been easier to launch an e-commerce store. But it all depends on how simple or complicated you want your site to be, and you may still run into certain technical issues.
It takes time to get customers to your site
Unlike marketplaces, where there are always shoppers looking to buy products, you will need to get people to come to your e-commerce site yourself. There’s marketing work to be done to spread the word. Once you get them to come, you will have to convert them into paying customers, which requires optimizing the site to have the best possible user experience.
What suits you best depends on who you are and what kind of products you are selling. Marketplaces will make many visitors available to you, but selling there comes with a 20% profit margin. If you want to build your brand and differentiate yourself, then running your own e-commerce site is the best option.
DG1 is an all-in-one platform that comes equipped with an excellent promotion engine, seamless product grid, fast shopping process (from cart to checkout), multiple payment gateways, and upsell/cross-sell options for promoting similar products your visitors have viewed. Ultimately, the rating and reviews feature will help you drive more traffic and increase sales by empowering your buyers to share their experience with your brand.
Get started today, and you’ll see for yourself that DG1 is one of the simplest and most effective e-commerce systems on the market.
Tags: e-commerce, marketplace, best, competition, retarget buyers
