As the COVID19 spread all around the world badly affecting the physical businesses due to lockdown improvements and sales deteriorating to the extreme dropped levels, this has severely benefited the widespread use of online shopping.
Business owners all around the globe are finding ways to secure the online presence to reach their target audience, locally, nationally, or internationally depending on their resources.
With that, the competition has been too high to bear where the strategy-less operators cannot survive for too long falling right off the cliff.
For the first-timers, the first is to differentiate the meaning to understand better what works for your business to thrive online.
The deep comparison between marketplace vs own website and similarly, the comparison of marketplace vs eCommerce site should reveal which route you need to pick for your type of business.
Indeed, these three platforms are not designed to uplift any or all kinds of businesses, hence, you need to understand it well to pick what is the one for your business to proceed with.
What is an Online Marketplace?
If you know a bit of information as to what is marketplace? Then we are sure you may find the reasoning behind what is an online marketplace?
In simpler words, the online marketplace gives both, the sellers, and buyers, the following;
- Sellers build their virtual shops under the appropriate category.
- List/upload the products to inspire the buyers.
- Buyers freely browse around and find their expected products.
- Buyers pay through the payment mechanism employed by the online marketplace.
- The online marketplace collects a percentage of the fee from every sale, and other incentives from the sellers to post/promote/feature their products and shops to earn money.
And there can be many other factors to generate income through the online marketplace.
The Comparison of Marketplace vs Own Website and Marketplace vs eCommerce Site
Three contenders, three opportunities, and your one business; let’s find out the complete details of marketplace vs own website vs eCommerce site.
Marketplace vs eCommerce site vs Own Website
We know what is meant by the marketplace and the role of your website telling what advantages and disadvantages both can bring you.
The Marketplace
Going with Marketplace, the pros that go with us;
- You run a business and decide to launch it on the pre-setup and pre-running platform named marketplace (or, online marketplace.)
- Requiring no domain name, hosting, and theme to buy.
- It saves you from running into the ordeal of SEO to the first rank than to start selling (it may take weeks to months to rank the set of search queries according to your product or category.)
- Set up the store and you are good to go. No coding or technical knowledge is required.
- Robust listing phase to get your products up online.
- Looks cool to have the online shop on the top-notch marketplaces.
The cons of having the store on the Marketplace;
- Forget about the brand building.
- Everything is based on the primary theme selected by the marketplace provider.
- Mind-boggling internal ranking system to understand and rank on the top for your chosen category.
- You do not have control over the user feedback and rating.
- Problematic refund system to always comply.
- Always pay the percentage at every sale.
The Own Website
Owning a website means everything is in your very own control.
The pros of having your website for business;
- Build a brand as you like, how you like.
- Customize to your expectations.
- Change/revert anything whenever you want.
- Write specific blogs to educate about your products.
- Customers jump from pages to pages, do not worry as all the pages are yours listed with your products.
The cons of having your website;
- Pick the domain and web hosting to pay an upfront fee to retain with the chance of losing the domain name if you fail to renew.
- Writing the content for products and blogs to keep the website fresh and updated, if you cannot write yourself, hire the prominent content writer (bigger expense!)
- Keep up with the SEO all the time.
- Fear of hitting with the Google updates.
- Errors and issues with the website, theme, and servers to be ready to deal with anytime.
- Wait for weeks or months while pouring the money all to see the pinch of results.
The eCommerce Site
Out of the comparison of marketplace vs e-commerce, the eCommerce site is almost about owning your website but it differs by the software.
With an eCommerce site, it is wise to take advantage of the pre-built eCommerce software to integrate with your website.
Let’s hop onto the pros of eCommerce site;
- The eCommerce site is easier to build against the recurring or one-time fee for the license.
- A low-cost solution that minimizes the need of developers, and designers.
- Listing and updating the content is simple.
- Does not require much technical aptitude about the platform.
- 24/7 help from the platform provider.
And take a look at cons of eCommerce site;
- Having an issue with the server? The back and forth between hosting provider and software provider could be a tedious job.
- No one would (hardly) accept the blame that triggered the issue with the platform/server.
- Cannot customize much from the software’s end.
- Skip the payment date and your eCommerce software could break.
- Can face issues after the upgrade of either software or web server.
- Integrate your payment system (another expense)
Pinching to know about is Amazon as a Marketplace or e-commerce?
Amazon is both; the marketplace and e-commerce platform.
With Amazon.com, it is an uncontested e-Commerce platform many tried beating. And with Amazon Marketplace where the sellers list their products against the fixed price and share the percentage upon confirmed sale.
So, if you are still unsure of is Amazon a marketplace or e-commerce, that should lead you here.
Conclusion!
No more confusion, we have deeply covered marketplace vs own website and marketplace vs eCommerce site with the honest pros and cons telling exactly the advantages, and disadvantages revealing which routes you should follow.
Despite all these reasons, we expect everyone to catch up with the bandwagon to employ the internet to grow your business beyond the barriers!