Selling online
, 3 min read
Your own online store, or a marketplace?
A marketplace brings you buyers and takes a cut of every sale. Your own store keeps the margin and the customer list. Most small brands should do both, in this order.
If you sell products, this is the decision that shapes everything else. It is usually presented as a choice between two options, and it is really a choice about where you want to be in three years.
What a marketplace gives you
- Buyers on day one. People are already there with a card out, searching for what you sell.
- Trust you did not have to earn. Nobody worries about whether the payment page is real.
- Logistics and returns handled, at a price.
- No build cost, so you can test whether a product sells before spending anything.
What it takes
- A commission on every single order, forever, plus fees for storage, shipping and advertising.
- The customer. You do not get their email, their phone number or permission to contact them again.
- Your position in the results, which the marketplace can change whenever it suits it.
- Price control, in practice, because you are one row in a list sorted by price.
- Your brand. Almost nobody remembers which seller they bought from.
On a marketplace you rent access to customers. On your own store you own it. Both are valid, and only one of them compounds.
The comparison, plainly
| Marketplace | Your own store | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting found | Built in traffic, heavy competition on price. | Nothing at first. You bring the traffic. |
| Cost per sale | A commission on every order, plus fees. | Payment gateway charges only. |
| Customer details | Theirs, not yours. | Yours, and reusable forever. |
| Brand | You are a row in a list. | The whole page is yours. |
| Up front cost | None. | A one time build cost. |
The order most small brands should do it in
- Sell wherever people already buy, including a marketplace or Instagram, and find out which products actually move.
- Once something sells reliably, build your own store for it. You now know which products deserve the effort.
- Send every repeat customer to your own store. Put the link on the packaging, in the invoice and on your Instagram bio.
- Keep the marketplace for discovery. Let it introduce people. Keep the second order for yourself.
The mistake is doing the reverse: building a store first for products nobody has bought yet, then wondering why an empty shop gets no visitors.
The WhatsApp middle ground
A lot of small Indian brands sell entirely over WhatsApp: photos, a price, a UPI transfer. It works, and it is not a lesser way to sell. It stops working when you are counting orders in a notebook, forgetting who paid, and losing an hour a day to the same four questions.
That is the moment a store pays for itself, and the sign is administrative rather than commercial. You are not looking for more orders, you are looking for the orders you already have to stop taking so long.
What we build, and what it costs
Our online store is ₹10,000, one time, with unlimited products, a payment gateway in your own name and no commission to us on anything you sell. It comes with a basic admin panel for products, prices, stock and orders, so you can run it day to day yourself.
If you are not yet sure which of your products sell, do not buy it yet. Test on a marketplace or on Instagram first, and come back when you know. We would rather build you a store you were ready for.