A marketplace lends you customers. Your own shop builds you a list of customers. They solve two different problems.
Small producers and shopkeepers ask us this almost every week. The honest answer is that it depends on what you sell and on who already knows your name. And for a good number of businesses, the right first move is not one or the other, but both, in a certain order.
What each option really costs you
Forget the sticker price for a moment. Compare two things instead: how much of every sale stays with you, and what you actually own at the end of the year. Written out plainly, the difference looks like this:
- A marketplace costs almost nothing to start, but takes a commission on every order, usually between 8% and 20% depending on the category.
- Your own shop costs a fixed sum up front, then hosting and maintenance, and takes no commission on any order, ever.
- On a marketplace the traffic is already there, but the customer belongs to the platform: you get the order, not the email address.
- On your own shop you have to bring the traffic yourself, which is slower, but the customer list is yours and you can write to it again.
- On a marketplace you compete on price, side by side with products identical to yours. On your own shop you compete on your name, your service and the way you explain things.
The rule we use before quoting anyone
If nobody is searching for your name yet, and your product is easy to compare with three others, start on a marketplace. It is the cheapest way to find out whether people will actually pay for what you make. You learn the real price, the real return rate and the real demand in a few weeks, and you spend almost nothing to learn it. Building a shop first, in that situation, means paying to find out something a marketplace would have told you for free.
If people already search for you, if your margin is thin, or if what you sell has to be explained before anyone buys it, your own shop pays for itself faster than most people expect. Thin margins and commissions do not fit in the same business. And a product that needs photos, measurements, a story or a short video does not survive in a list of forty identical items sorted by price.
One concrete calculation, done with real numbers
Numbers settle this argument better than opinions do. Take a small shop selling 40 orders a month with an average basket of 45 EUR, on a platform charging 15% commission. Nothing unusual: that is a normal month for a small producer. Here is where the money goes over a year, and what the same money buys if you spend it on your own shop instead:
- 40 orders at 45 EUR is 1,800 EUR of sales a month. At 15%, the commission is 270 EUR a month, which is 3,240 EUR a year.
- A simple, well-built online shop for a catalogue of that size costs around 1,800 EUR once, plus roughly 240 EUR a year for hosting, backups and updates.
- So the first year costs about 2,040 EUR against 3,240 EUR of commissions: you keep around 1,200 EUR. From the second year on you pay 240 EUR instead of 3,240 EUR.
- Put differently, the commissions pay for the whole shop in under eight months. After that, every month the shop is running you are keeping money you were handing over before.
When the marketplace is simply the right answer
We sell online shops, so take this as seriously as it is meant. There are cases where pushing you towards your own shop would be us taking your money. If you sell a handful of standard products that people search for by category and not by maker, the marketplace is where that demand already is, and no amount of design will move it. If you have no photos, no product descriptions and nobody who can answer an email within a day, a shop of your own will sit there empty and you will blame the shop.
The combination that works best for most of the businesses we see is not a choice at all. Keep your most standard products on the marketplace, where existing demand finds them. Put everything else on your own shop: the pieces that need explaining, the bundles, the higher-margin work, and every customer who has already bought once. Then print your web address on the packaging, on the receipt and on the bag. The platform sends you a first-time buyer; your job is to make the second purchase happen somewhere you own.
In short
- A marketplace rents demand; your own shop builds an asset.
- Commissions of 8% to 20% are a permanent cost, not a launch cost.
- 40 orders a month at 15% is 3,240 EUR a year in commissions.
- Unknown name and easy-to-compare product: start on the marketplace.
- Standard items on the platform, repeat customers on your own shop.
If you want to run these numbers against your own sales before deciding anything, have a look at our prices and packages.