Selling on your own Website Beats eBay or Amazon In Most Ways that Matter, You’re Better off on Your Own
Selling on your own eCommerce site vs. eBay or Amazon
- Control. The most obvious aspect of the two situations is that of control – on your own website, you exercise total control, and on anyone else’s, you are subject to their regulations and practices.
- Costs. Once you have set up your own website, either through your own development team or with the help of consultants, your only ongoing costs are web hosting, domain renewals, and any kind of maintenance or upgrades, compared to the monthly or annual provider costs.
- Branding. When you have your own website established from which you conduct your business, it has your company name associated with it and that immediately generates some degree of professionalism and name-brand recognition. When you sell from another site like eBay, your products or services are basically helping to enhance their brand name rather than your own, regardless of their claims to the contrary. One other important point is that on your own website, you can sell not only your products but your company and its great customer service and attention to detail – all of which contribute to its branding.
- Ongoing marketing. There are considerable fees and commissions charged by eBay and Amazon for their marketing campaigns which are supposed to popularize your products. To enhance your own site’s marketing, you might only need to undergo search engine optimization.
- Product loyalty. Amazon or eBay will feel no more loyalty to your product than they might to your competitor’s products, so from the same platform your competitor might be whisking customers away from you. If Amazon decided to stop selling your product tomorrow, you might be bankrupt the day after that. And if Amazon decided to purchase a company which markets your product, they would then promote their own affiliate, and pull the rug out from under you just like that.
- Service interruptions. On your own website, you don’t really have much to worry about from service interruptions, unless a server somewhere suddenly dies and its backup follows suit. Amazon or eBay could arbitrarily suspend your selling privileges with them because customers made complaints about something, and they don’t want such complaints to reflect negatively on them.
Get help with your website
As should be clear from the above, in most cases you are better off to create your own eCommerce website rather than using an e-Commerce provider, because it’s very easy to engage the services of an eCommerce consultant or an eCommerce site builder. One of the best platforms you can use for your website is Magento eCommerce, and if you really want the best, CommerceBees can create Magento website for your business, and help you start realizing the benefits of strong branding, a first-class internet presence, and steady profits.
