Are you an online retailer looking at weighing up the options as to where best to sell your products? we have put together a handy guide to cover some of the benefits of selling through your own website compared to a couple of the most popular online market places.

So you might be thinking as a web design company this is going to be a biased view and just say ‘use your own website, we can build you one’ but that’s not the route we wanted to take the company down, we try to give honest advice that is actually relevant to businesses and hopefully as both our businesses grow we can work more together in the future.

Now before we begin, every business is different, meaning there is no ‘correct’ answer to the question, your businesses are all going to be at different levels or you may have different aspirations for where you want to take the business or different time scales, budgets etc. With that being said we have outlined some of the data comparing your own site to Etsy and Not on the high street in the info-graphic below and started to outline some of the key advantages and disadvantages to the sales platforms.

The advantage of selling on Etsy and Not on the high street is that essentially they are a market place in their own right, people might come across your products just by browsing the site and as established brands in their own right can generate a decent amount of sales for your business, that being said this comes at a cost which in the 2 in question can be; listing fees, sign up fees and commission on sales, and all of this is fine but if you’re doing your own marketing, so directing people to these products through social media posts, word of mouth at shows, business cards, shops etc etc you might as well be driving that traffic to somewhere where you are not paying extra commission and other fees on the sales, not only this but having your own site comes with more benefits and just a few are:

• No fees
• Control you own destiny (you are not at the whims of the ever changing policies of a marketplace who could one day decide that they want to shut down your shop or up the rates)
• You do not have other retailers products linked around your store, you keep the customer in your site.
• Your own postage system for fees and policies
• Higher design control – you are not using a set theme, you can go as wild as you like to make your shop yours
• More memorability and referrals – if you buy something off Etsy and someone asks where you got it, the response is: Etsy, whereas if someone buys from your own site you are more likely to be referred as the retailer meaning it is potentially easier to grow your customer base
• More in control of your SEO
• Better customer list building
• Better analytics
• Use of tools such as the facebook pixel

So all in all there are lots of benefits to selling on your own site, we are not recommending you cut all other ties with online marketplaces, but if you’re marketing your own business in any sense it makes sense to point them to your own site and use the online market places to pick up custom that would only ever come through that market place.

If you wanted to talk more in depth about your businesses precise situation and go over some of the stats and the costs / savings of changing your current situation then get in touch.

In the mean time check out the info-graphic below

Cheers Rich