When considering where to sell products, merchants have two most effective options – sell on a marketplace and build an online store. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ecommerce industry is immensely growing, and this trend will continue to rise more than ever before! For this reason, numerous brick-and-mortar businesses have abandoned the traditional tactics only to sell their products online.

Let’s delve into the top 5 reasons why it is better to sell on your own online store instead of an online marketplace:

Establish Credibility & Strengthen The Brand

When you sell your products or services on a marketplace, there are several restrictions from logo usage to word count limits. There is little room for branding and customization. In fact, only the marketplace’s brand is at the forefront and not yours. Thus, it’s nearly impossible to build credibility and brand recognition. 

Many visitors assume that the marketplace owns the products you sell without even knowing you exist, and after a successful purchase, they only remember the marketplace!

Your prime aim should be to connect consumers with your brand when they think of the products you sell. When you build your own online store, you get complete control, including how you design it and deliver your message. You can even use custom boxes to deliver your products to leave a lasting impression. The best part is your brand gets all the credit and not any marketplace.

• Build An Email List To Target Potential Audience

The most significant benefit of having your online store is that you can effectively market your products to your target audience, unlike marketplaces, where customers who purchase your products are only clients of the marketplace. Having an online store allows you to sell directly and build an email list that you can use later for marketing promotions, announcing new products, and offer discounts.

Getting repeating customers is problematic on a marketplace since you can’t directly access your customers. You have fewer opportunities to offer good customer service or promoting your other products. However, having your online store and an email list allows you to determine who purchased your product, when, how and what they purchased. You can utilize this information to suggest future products according to your client’s specific needs.

• Complete Freedom To Create Your Store

Creating your online store gives you complete freedom to impact the buying journey and user experience. You can add your product videos and images in specific places. You can alter the navigation and layout. You can change your store’s theme and color scheme at any point of time. You can add texts and buttons without any word count limitations. You can effectively deliver your brand’s message and so much more!

Above all, your competitor’s products will never pop-up beside your products in your online store as it does in a marketplace. You can also decide the product price and offer free shipping to influence consumer behavior and encourage them to purchase again. With your online store, you control the storefront and test and validate what’s working best and bringing the most revenue!

• Increased Marketing Opportunities On Multiple Channels

Even if you have your store online doesn’t mean people will come flocking to you automatically. To acquire customers in your store, you have to drive traffic through SEO strategies and online presence on multiple social media platforms. You can customize your marketing strategies to meet the audience’s specific shopping needs as you have your store. For example, you can use Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads to reach a potential audience. You can also run flash sales and promotions to provoke interest and retarget past shoppers. Overall, there are numerous ways to attract an audience to your online store, from running a contest to creating videos – that can ultimately lead to a sale!

• Get To Know The Audience More

Having your own online store helps you understand the customer’s psychology. This includes how they heard about your brand, which channel has been used to make a purchase, what traffic sources are attracting the potential audience and which marketing campaigns should get more budget allocation. 

Not only can you get information about the existing customers, but also about those customers who didn’t purchase your products. For example, maybe it’s the product page that was not user-friendly; perhaps it doesn’t have good customer reviews and shipping costs are too high, or the checkout process doesn’t have enough payment methods that’s why customers abandoned the shopping carts.

You can use all this information about your audience to improve and optimize your online store to increase conversion rates.

Tips For Your Online Store Success

• Start Small

Don’t try to create a vast online store featuring hundreds of products. Instead, start small and test a maximum of 4 to 5 products to gauge audience interest and resolve the kinks in the ordering and fulfillment procedures.

• Test, Improve & Repeat

Don’t expect your first efforts to be flawless. Technology offers you to try and test multiple things economically and quickly and improve accordingly.

• Always Be Attractive

Feature attractive product videos and images, write compelling descriptions, and include an easily navigable layout, so the audience can quickly find their desired product and hit the buy button. Besides that, engage the audience with educational and fun extras such as adding background information, product unboxing videos, and how-to tips on your store.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Having your own ecommerce store helps you grow your brand, acquire a wide range of customers, gain valuable insights, and get completely creative with the marketing strategies. Moreover, your online presence will always protect your business from being at the mercy of marketplaces and their rules. Now is the right time to get started with your online business journey. It will give you a competitive edge over sellers who have not embraced the world of ecommerce yet, in an age where people want the easiest and quickest ways to purchase while maintaining a busy lifestyle.