Pros and Cons of Selling from Your Own Ecommerce Store

Running an online business all by yourself requires a great skill set. Though you may feel that the basics are just the same as a traditional brick and mortar business, there are of course some features that make both the business methods distinct.

The growth of ecommerce has increased and it has opened up a lot of opportunity for the people to start a business with very little investment, but starting and running an e-store is not without any challenges. An online store doesn’t mean that consumers will buy, because with more than 200 million websites on the web, ecommerce owners are also facing a great deal of market competition.

Thanks to the internet, that today’s small businesses at lease have the opportunity to sell beyond their physical stores through e-stores, marketplaces, social media and etc. With each channel having its own advantages and disadvantages, great customer reach and ease of use has made them an ideal means to expand their customer base online.

Today’s marketplace economy is dominated by the players like Amazon and eBay for a simple fee or commission. But independent sellers can market and sale their products through them and get a great platform to start. While some customer may experience a positive result on marketplaces, there are other business owners who have to sacrifice their control over the experience that the shoppers were enjoying before.

Benefits of Selling Through Your Own Ecommerce Website:

Create a Better Brand Entity

Hiring an ecommerce development company for selling your own products or services has its own advantage. If you have the hopes to turn your product into a brand, then selling the products from your own site will actually help you to quickly position yourself as a brand. With a complete website design that matches your mission and vision, promoting content related to your brand is easier when you are selling solely. It is in fact much harder to position yourself as a brand when selling on marketplaces.

Retargeting the Customers is Much More Streamlined with Your Own Ecommerce Website:

If you have invested in ecommerce development for your business, then you can easily plan marketing strategies to suit your specific business needs.  This means that you are ready to sell products to your potential customers, offer them personalized content and add special benefits to retarget your customers. Then entire process of tracking the customers and gathering data is much more streamlined than selling the products on a marketplace.

Flexibility in Marketing:

By creating your own ecommerce site, you can easily target your customers in plenty of ways. You can prepare marketing plans that may have, Google ads, Facebook ads and even LinkedIn targeting, which can help you with unconditional leads. But practicing such marketing tactics on the marketplace is futile and difficult at the same time.

Disadvantages of selling on your own ecommerce store:

Set Up cost is High: 

One chief reason why start-up online business owners shy away from creating their website is the initial cost of developing, designing and marketing of the site which requires huge investments. Hiring a team of developers to build the site and optimizing it needs additional resources and it is a full time task to keep an eye on your web store which is time taking.

 

Also Read: How Augmented Reality will be Used to Customize the Ecommerce User Experience

 

Creating Marketing Strategies on Your Own:

If you sell on a marketplace, then a significant task of creating the marketing strategies is shaped by them. But if you have to set up your own store, then you will have to undertake everything from choosing the right keyword for creating ads on your own.

Struggle to Generate Traffic:

Another most common issue that ecommerce owner faces when they launch their own e-store is to generate traffic. They have to spend a lot of time to create a beautiful site and optimize it for the search engines. But by selling the products on a marketplace, you already have a big traffic on the site that can help you generate sales.