If you are a newbie in the eCommerce industry, making the choice where to list your products isn’t an easy task. You have to look for all the available possibilities and benefits offered by them before making any move. Online trading basically helps a vendor to reach out among chunk of customers easily and take their business to new heights.E-commerce websites and the marketplaces are the two prime options when it comes to online trading. Both of them are followed with their own pros and cons.
Marketplace Vs eCommerce Websites
First of all, lets narrow down how these two exactly differ from each other. Marketplace is a third party website which provides a
platform to many third party retailers to sell their products online. Example: Amazon, eBay, Flipkart, Etsy etc. The vendors can join the marketplace and start selling their products online. On the other hand eCommerce website is an independently owned store of a seller
where customers can buy products of a particular brand directly from its native website. These websites are self owned by the merchants and can be easily built using various eCommerce platforms like Shopify, PrestaShop, Magento, WooCommerce etc.
Both of these options comes with advantages and disadvantages and this is what makes difficult for a seller to make the right choice. Here are some of the factors which will surely help you to understand the difference between both the platforms in detail and help them in deciding the best choice for their business:
1. Building Brand Image:
There’s no doubt in saying that creating your own website gives you full control on your brand’s image. You can easily present your product according to your own choice without any hassle. But, anyone who is a seller on marketplace would have the limited options therefore, he/she will be unable to affect the brand in any way possible. The presentation factors like layout, font, colour etc are standardised by the marketplace due to which often it happens that the product pages are not appealing and attractive for the users. Marketplaces also forbid sellers for mentioning their company name in any way. That is a loss too.
Creating a great brand image is immensely important when it comes to sell online. No matter on which platform you are using for the same. Having your own website provides you the authority to create a product page on your own choice. It lets you create the experience you want for your customers. You can also encourage your brand personality by reflecting your professionalism in your website design.
2. Traffic and Leads:
Building your brand image is not just enough in an online business. Making good sales is crucially important as well.
If you are an eCommerce store owner, you can implement various strategies and tactics to promote your brand name. Right from optimising your website rank till creating a social networking campaign, you can go for anything which suits you. However, there is a possibility that all these strategies can take a lot of time and efforts with no assurity of successful results.
On the other hand Marketplaces are well-established and highly trusted website than self-owned web-stores. Selling on a Marketplace could be an advantage for this factor as it’s easy for customers to reach out your products. According to statista.com, 197 million users visited Amazon’s websites per month. The huge popularity of Marketplace for online shopping automatically provides you the accessibility to million of customers without spending any money on marketing.
3. Effortless start:
Seller need not to worry about the features like domain name, hosting name etc. All these features and mechanism are already well established in the Marketplace. Moreover sellers need not to look for the marketing platforms in order to promote their products.
4. Customer Experience:
If your product has been purchased on a Marketplace, the customer experience is totally associated with Marketplace and not with the seller. Although the product belongs to the seller but, still the user-experience belongs to the Marketplace.
If you are an eCommerce site owner then the customer experience with the product directly belongs to your website. Seller has the full authority to control and customise all the factors associated with the product review and enhance the user shopping experience. But, they need to do it on their own.
5. Expand your Reach:
It’s really important to attract visitors towards your product and convert them into potential buyers. Selling through your website provides you the freedom to display products as per your choice but the your product reach is confined to limited customers only. Sellers would be missing out millions of leads across border which clearly results in limited sales.
Whereas, Marketplace helps you to expand your business worldwide with minimal efforts. Seller is able to access millions of customers globally without making any advanced investments. You can even make a good cross border sales and boost up their overall business growth too.
6. Wide payment options:
Wide payment methods offered by the Marketplace offers an hassle free checkout experience to the customers. Payment options often influences the shopping decision of the customers. Availability of Multiple payment methods tempts the sellers to get enrolled in the Marketplace.
Conclusion:
Well, it’s good for a seller to own an eComemrce website but selling through marketplace won’t hurt your sales either. Many online merchants sell on both marketplaces and their own website to expand customer reach and brand recognition. However, the best place to sell online totally depends on the product type and category of your store. So, regardless of the platform you choose to sell on, it’s important to be aware about the latest trend going on in the eCommerce industry and implement it for massive sales and growth of your business.
Now you can easily list down your products on marketplaces like Etsy, eBay, Walmart and others in just a few simple steps. KnowBand offers Marketplace Integrators for various CMS platforms like PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento and Shopify which allows you to present your products among larger audience and encourage the brand recognition as well.
As today’s generation rely on their handheld devices for any online purpose. It’s really important for a vendor to reach the customer’s devices to ensure higher sales and growth. Knowband offers Advanced Magento Marketplace mobile Extension to build a fully-functional marketplace and a mobile app at same time for your store.
Find out our more articles here:
Why you should start selling on a Marketplace?
Why you should integrate your eCommerce store with a Marketplace?
Hey Joe,
I was in a confusion between both the options. Now, I have cleared my doubts. Thank you so much for this useful information.
Waiting for more such articles.
Hey John,
I feel glad this article helped you.
Thnx for the appreciation.
Very informative article. This article has really peaked my interest.
I am going to take a note of your website and keep checking for new information about once per week.
Waiting for more such articles.