By Richard Broomstick
I am always asked this question by people who want to sell online and make some money on the side or even as a full-time occupation. So, to re-iterate the question, why sell online via an online marketplace rather than starting your own web store?
Community: One thing you will definitely miss out on by starting your own web store is being part of a marketplace community of buyers and sellers. Why is this important you ask? Well, a community does not only make the buying and selling experience more fun by interacting with other marketplace members but a community also helps foster increased sales and product exposure by leveraging the power of the masses.
Exposure: Does Search Engine Optimization ring a bell? A lot of people underestimate the amount of work it takes to get your web store out there. There is this notion that as soon as you launch a web store, or any website for that matter, that you are instantly going to get traffic to it as there are literally millions of internet users crawling the web who are likely to stumble upon your website, right? Wrong! You might have the most awesome products in the world on sale that everybody wants, but unless you put the hard work in building traffic towards your web store you are likely to make little to no sales. On the other hand most popular marketplaces have already spent a lot of time and money for that matter in building traffic to their website through search engine optimization, running ad campaigns and building followers to their website through various social networks. What this means in the end for someone who wants to sell online is that the burden of getting your products up and running and getting them the exposure they deserve is already done for you to a large extent.
Standing out from the rest: There are literally millions of online stores out there, and to be honest the vast majority of them look the same. That probably has to do with the fact that most of them are using the same publicly available ‘create your own online shop in 3 steps’ ecommerce web application. Although a lot of these ready-made ecommerce hosted packages have progressed over time in terms of aesthetics allowing the end user more flexibility in editing the design template, they are still very limited in terms of how far you can stretch your creative boundaries. In the dawn of web 2.0 websites, design and functionality are playing a very important role for anyone who wants to buy and sell online. An online marketplace provides an outlet for you to display your products whilst also providing you the buying and selling tools and website aesthetics to meet today’s standards when it comes to being successful in making sales.