Building a website vs using an online marketplace

When businesses are thinking about going digital, this is a question that many ask themselves: should they register for a marketplace, or should they go about building their e-commerce website and sell directly to their audience?

The conversation of marketplaces and e-commerce websites isn’t new, but business owners in TT have never been faced with this many options to build their businesses online.

With the announcement of TSTT’s Parlour Caribbean marketplace, this question is sure to be asked even more often. At present, TT has over 50 online marketplaces to choose from – further complicating the decision of which marketplace to select if you decide to go that route, as not all marketplaces are the same. They include Planting Seeds, Caribshopper, Parlour Caribbean, Trinitrolley, TooToolBay and many more.

TT is also too small a market to sustain all these marketplaces, so let’s get down to the pros and cons. That way you have some assistance in picking the right pathway for you.

Choosing whether to have your website or use an online marketplace is a business decision and one that must align with your business model, finances and marketing strategy.

If you are thinking about building your website, here are three key pros to this choice:

1. You have full control of the platform and can create your own branded experience when people land on your website. Your content, aesthetics, checkout processes, payment and delivery options are all within your control.

2. You can work on your search engine optimisation, which will allow you to show up in various search engines like Google and Bing. Sixty-three per cent of all sales start with a Google search, even if the interaction was conducted at the physical location.

3. Your website is one of the greatest tools on the market for data collection. You can add backend tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster, Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, Retargeting Pixels, CRM and much more. This data can help you understand your audience and grow your business.

The main con to building your website is that it needs technical knowledge to get started, you will need to build out your processes for payments and deliveries and even though you have the website built, you need to learn how it works for it to gain clients, sales and leads for your business.

The expenses of building a website can vary. It’s cheaper to build it yourself, but the cost can rise when hiring developers.

Using a marketplace helps you with not having to build out a platform, and marketplaces will typically handle the payments and logistics of your items.

The cons of marketplaces are as follows:

1. The marketplace focuses on building its brand, eg, Amazon, eBay or Craigslist. The bigger the brand name of the platform, the more consumers it will attract . The platform needs to focus on building its brand first and cannot focus on pushing your brand, because it lists thousands of vendors.

2. Your competition is on the same platform as you. If you are selling pepper sauce, for example, there can be dozens or hundreds of other brands selling the same item. It allows consumers easily to compare your brand to others, and you can get lost on the platform amongst the noise.

3. You have
zero control over the platform. You cannot create an experience on the marketplace the way you can on your website. The experience is solely up to the marketplace. Its UX/UI, their branding, the checkout processes, payment and delivery options and customer services – this is all handled by the marketplace. Choosing the wrong platform can affect your brand and alienate customers.

4. Most marketplaces have high subscription fees that you have to pay regardless of whether you sell or not.

5. Marketplace saturation is very high in TT, which means most of the platforms are unable to bring in a high number of vendors, which lowers the value of the overall marketplace and defeats the purpose of the marketplace concept.

I believe the strongest thing for a brand to do is to have its own website and list on a great marketplace. Nothing is stopping you from having the best of both worlds.

Don’t just leave everything up to the marketplace to grow your brand online. Even if you decide not to have an e-commerce-ready website and link to your shop on the marketplace, but you use your website to create content and grow your brand’s presence online, that will work tremendously.

Keron Rose is a digital strategist who works with Caribbean businesses to build their digital presence and monetise their platforms. Learn more at KeronRose.com or listen to the Digipreneur FM podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify or Google Podcast.