Ecommerce, marketplaces and Amazon: where to actually sell online
There are three ways to sell online, and almost everyone who starts picks one without knowing the other two exist. Some open their own store, some lean on a marketplace, some go straight to Amazon. They’re different roads, with different margins and different problems.
I’ve worked inside e-commerce since I started selling online, and I keep seeing the same scene. A brand picks the wrong channel for its product, invests six months in it, and only afterwards realizes the problem wasn’t the product but the place where it was selling it. This article exists so you don’t lose those six months.
Ecommerce is selling products or services online. You can do it three ways. With your own store, where you have full control but you have to build the traffic yourself. On a marketplace, where the traffic is already there but you pay commissions and play by rules that aren’t yours. On Amazon, the largest marketplace, great for moving volume fast but with margins you need to manage carefully. There’s no best channel in absolute terms, only the right one for your product, your margin and your budget.
What ecommerce is and how it actually works
E-commerce means electronic commerce, selling and buying goods or services over the internet. Put like that it sounds trivial, and the concept is. What isn’t trivial is turning it into a business that actually makes a margin.
Behind the word there are different models. B2C is selling directly to the consumer, the most common case, from the shoe shop to the supplement brand. B2B is selling between companies, with larger orders and negotiated pricing. D2C (direct to consumer) is when a brand skips distributors and sells directly, keeping the full margin but also all the responsibility. Most of the brands I work with sit in B2C or D2C.
The flow is always the same. A customer lands on the product page, evaluates, adds to cart, pays, receives. The critical point isn’t the cart or the payment, those work on their own today with any platform. The critical point is where that customer comes from and how much it costs you to get them there. That’s where it’s decided whether the e-commerce makes money or loses it.
Generic guides stop at the definition and the list of payment methods. The real problem starts afterwards, when you have to choose where to build the store.
Starting an ecommerce, what you actually need
To sell online seriously you need a few concrete things. A registered business with the right setup for e-commerce. A platform to upload products to. A payment system (Stripe, PayPal, cards). A way to handle logistics and shipping. And the piece almost every guide forgets, a way to bring traffic to the product page.
On the “where to build it” side, the practical options are three. Shopify, if you want to launch fast with a monthly fee and little technical headache. WooCommerce on WordPress, if you want more control and lower variable cost but more maintenance. A headless or custom setup, if you have specific needs and someone to run it. I build sites this way for brands myself, so I say it with experience, the platform matters far less than people think for the final result. The acquisition strategy matters far more.
So many people open an e-commerce focusing on the site’s design and zero on the traffic. Then they launch, and for two months they only sell to friends and family. The site isn’t the business. The site is the shop window. The business is the machine that brings people in front of the window, and that machine costs time or costs money, it’s rarely free.
Here’s the first real decision. Building your own store means starting from zero on traffic. Going to a marketplace means starting with the traffic already switched on. Two different worlds.
Your own store or a marketplace, the choice that decides your margins
This is the choice generic e-commerce articles never tackle, and it’s the one that actually moves the numbers.
With your own store you have complete control. You set the price and the design, the customer data is yours, you build a brand that holds value over time. The downside is you pay for all the traffic, with SEO that takes months or with advertising that takes budget. In the early days it’s normal to spend more on ads than comes back, until you build a base of customers who return.
With a marketplace it’s the opposite. The traffic is already there, millions of people already searching for products with intent to buy. You upload the product and in theory you can sell on day one. The downside is you pay a commission on every sale, the platform sets the rules, and the customers are mostly the platform’s, not yours.
Your own store
Full control and full margin.
Customers and data are yours.
But you pay for traffic, from zero.
Marketplace
Traffic ready from day one.
You sell sooner, you scale faster.
But you pay commissions and play by their rules.
The honest answer, after watching dozens of brands try, is that these aren’t alternatives you pick once and forever. The marketplace is the fastest way to validate a product and bring in cash now. Your own store is the way to build margin and brand over the long run. The brands that grow the most usually use both, but they start with whichever one their product and budget make sustainable first.
What a marketplace is and when it actually makes sense
First a clarification, because there’s confusion. If you search “marketplace” on Google you mostly find Facebook Marketplace, which is a classifieds board between private individuals. That’s not what I mean here. An e-commerce marketplace is a platform where many different sellers sell to the platform’s customers, with the platform bringing the traffic and often handling payments and logistics too. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Zalando are marketplaces in this sense.
The logic of why a marketplace makes sense is simple. You bring the product, they bring the people. For a new brand, with no marketing budget and no time to build SEO, it’s often the only realistic way to generate the first real sales in a short time.
It makes sense when your product already has existing demand, meaning someone is already searching for it. It makes less sense when you sell something so new or so niche that nobody searches for it yet, because there the marketplace’s advantage, the ready traffic, simply isn’t there. In that case your own store with a good content strategy can work better.
The price you pay is the commission and the dependency. If the marketplace changes the rules, you adapt. If it suspends your account, your sales stop overnight. That’s why I always say not to build the whole business on a single channel you don’t control.
Selling on Amazon, the marketplace I use every day
Among marketplaces, Amazon is the one I’ve worked on every day since 2018, and for most physical-product brands it’s the most sensible starting point. The reason is volume. People on Amazon aren’t browsing, they’re looking for a product to buy right now. Purchase intent is very high, higher than on almost any other channel.
To sell on Amazon you open a Seller Central account, pick a selling plan, upload products and decide whether to handle shipping yourself or hand it to Amazon with FBA logistics. From there the game is played on three things, the quality of the product page, the internal advertising (Amazon PPC) and the margin left after fees. If you want the story of how I got there, I wrote it in the article on how I started selling on Amazon.
The number one mistake I see on new Amazon accounts is always the same, launching without a pricing plan and burning margin on advertising in the first months. I’ve seen brands with a good product almost break even after FBA fees and ads, simply because nobody ran the numbers before launch. On Amazon the right product at the wrong price loses money quietly.
The two things that decide whether Amazon makes you money are the fees and the campaigns. On the fees I put all the real numbers, referral fee by category, FBA, storage and net margin on a real product, in the guide on how much it really costs to sell on Amazon. On the campaigns, ACoS, TACoS and structure, I explained everything in how Amazon PPC works. And if you’re weighing selling as a Seller or switching to Vendor, the difference is worth thousands a year and I analyzed it in Seller Central vs Vendor Central.
Amazon isn’t the answer for everyone. For very niche products, or for premium brands that live on positioning and price control, your own store sometimes returns more. But for moving volume fast on a product with existing demand, it’s hard to beat Amazon’s traffic.
What selling online actually costs
This is the part that breaks a lot of back-of-the-envelope plans. Each channel has a different cost structure, and comparing them only on the “starting price” is misleading.
On your own store the visible cost is low. A Shopify plan starts around $30 a month, WooCommerce can cost even less in hosting. But the real cost is traffic acquisition. Between advertising and SEO, bringing a customer to your site can cost several dollars, and that cost never fully goes away.
On a marketplace like Amazon the subscription is low (around $39 a month for the Professional plan), but on every sale you pay a referral fee that in most categories sits between 7% and 15%, plus logistics fees if you use FBA, plus advertising if you want visibility. You don’t pay for traffic upfront like on your own store, you pay it downstream as a percentage and commissions.
| Variable | Your own store | Marketplace / Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic | To be built (SEO + ads) | Already there |
| Time to first sales | Weeks or months | Days |
| Price control | Total | Yours on Amazon Seller, Amazon’s on Vendor |
| Main cost | Traffic acquisition | Commissions + fees + advertising |
| Customer ownership | Yours | The platform’s |
| Long-term brand | You build it | Harder to defend |
The truth is neither one is “cheaper”. On the store you pay first, in advertising, to build an asset that stays yours. On the marketplace you pay later, in commissions, to avoid having to build the traffic. The right question isn’t “which costs less”, it’s “where does my margin hold after paying the channel’s real cost”.
My rule for choosing where to sell
After managing 50+ brands across 22 categories and 6 markets in Europe and the United States, I built a practical rule I still use today when a brand asks me where to start.
Before you read it, answer four quick questions. I will tell you which channel I would start from in your case.
Where should you sell your product?
Answer four questions and I will tell you which channel I would start from if I were in your shoes.
Pick one option for each and I will tell you where I would start.
Indicative quiz, not an absolute verdict. The real choice depends on your real numbers, but this gives you an honest starting direction.
Does your product already have demand? Start on Amazon
If people are already searching for a product like yours, the marketplace gives you real sales fast and lets you validate price and margin with real data, not assumptions. It’s the quickest way to find out whether the product stands up.
Do you live on brand and price control? Build the store
If your value is premium positioning, experience, the direct relationship with the customer, your own store gives you the control a marketplace never will. Plan for it as a months-long investment, not a days-long one.
Working on one channel? Add the second
When a channel runs and makes margin, it’s time to add the other so you don’t depend on one alone. I launched a brand to $2,000 a day in six months exactly this way, validating fast and then widening.
There’s no answer that fits everyone, and be wary of anyone who gives you one without looking at your product and your numbers. The worst thing you can do is pick the channel by fashion, because “everyone goes on Amazon” or because “a site looks more professional”. Choose based on margin and demand, the rest is opinions.
If you want a take on your specific case, this is exactly what I do, from channel strategy to Amazon management, and you can see how I work on my Amazon page.