If you’re currently selling on eBay, Amazon, Poshmark or other sites you have likely noticed the fees, the feedback system, “policy changes”, etc. Selling on someone elses site can be a major source of frustration because THEY are always in control of your destiny. I’m sure you have considered if you should switch to your own site.

PROS:

Substantially lower basic fees. We pay our website fee and domain registration. You can get a nice entry-level BigCommerce or Shopify site for under $30 a month. Your domain registration will be $20 or less per year.

Of course you still have merchant account fees to process payments. Let’s call this 3% regardless of where you sell. But where you are really saving money is by not paying listing fees, closing costs / Final Value Fees, etc. By selling on your own site you will be automatically saving 10%-20% of every single listing. That really adds up. But let’s say you sell $100,000 in inventory on eBay or Amazon. After fees you’re taking in around $82,000. Now factor in product cost (let’s pretend it’s $35,000), you are left with $47,000, before shipping costs, supplies, taxes (ugh). It’s not unreasonable to assume these costs are at least $10,000, which means you’ll end up with under $40,000 by selling on someone elses platform. Yikes! Now compare that to $100,000 made on your own website. You will automatically make $18,000 more just by not paying someone else fees! So, on your own site you’ll bring in $55,000 instead of $37,000; We can all agree that is a big difference! And you’ll especially notice this financial difference as you grow. When you are selling $100,000 a MONTH, that $18,000 monthly difference adds up FAST. In fact, in 12 months time, that’s $216,000! In under 5 years, that is over 1 MILLION DOLLARS difference… just by NOT paying all those damn fees!

As mentioned, a basic site will run you around $30 a month. As you grow you can keep upgrading to better plans. We currently pay around $300 a month just for the site, $300 for the mailing list, $300 for the loyalty program and a boatload of other add-ons… it adds up to thousands a month, but we didn’t start with all this stuff!!! We started with the cheapest plan and nothing more and increased it as we grew.

Since you have your own site, you don’t have to worry about violating a policy or competitors flagging your listings or even eBay changing their search result algorithm.

Additionally you can create your own policies; don’t want to offer Returns for 90 days? Great! Change it to whatever you want. Want to put videos or links in your listings? Go for it.

Want to run a sale?  Offer Gift Wrap?  Offer Coupons?  Have a blog? Work with a Charity?  You can even monetize your website with Ads if you wanted. The world is your oyster!  

CONS:

You’re going to need a lot of time to grow. A LOT. eBay, Amazon, etc already have traffic whereas you are creating a website from nothing. You are NOT going to have any traffic at all. Literally 0 for a couple months… because it takes search engines a couple months to index your site so it can be discoverable in search engines. But it’s great to use these couple months to list, list, list, list, liiiiiisssssstttttt.  When you're done reading this post, be sure to read The First 35 Steps to Start Your New eCommerce Website

You have to set almost everything up from scratch. BigCommerce and Shopify let you choose from pre-built site (“Templates”)

but you have to make it yours It’s not hard, it’s just very, very time consuming.  You have to write all of your policy pages, set up Shipping, merchant accounts, Categories and Sub Categories... it takes a while.

With that being said, you’ll have to learn quite a bit. Honestly, it’s exciting but also frustrating. The good news is that there’s now so many tutorials available online that it’s so much easier to start your own site in 2020 than it was back in 2005. Also, BigCommerce has AMAZING tech support, including Live Chat. I would honestly say that it’s among the best customer service EVER.

Don’t be scared of “building a website”. BigCommerce and Shopify pre-built templates have the site already built, so you don’t need to know how to code. However, I would recommend (if you can afford it), hire MAK Digital Designs from New Jersey to make your site awesome for you. They are super affordable and they work fast and accurate. If you are really on a major budget, just do it yourself and make it nicer as you grow.

It’s a lot of work in general. A real lot. With sites like ebay you can easily pause listings if you have to deal with life. Whereas with your own site, if you were to pause all of your listings you would kill your entire business. So there’s really no such thing as “take some time off”.  But if you're already spending all day listing on a Marketplace site, then there's no reason you won't be successful on your own site. On the otherhand, if you list infrequently on Marketplace sites, then getting your own site would be a waste of money.

In your “free time” you’ll have to find ways to improve, grow, drive traffic to your site, post on social media, try to get people to leave you reviews on social media… there genuinely isn’t a “day off” anymore because instead of selling at someone elses business, you now have your entirely own business.  

IN CLOSING

If you are a full time marketplace seller and you list at least 100 items a week, you absolutely should make the switch!  Especially if you currently have a full eBay / Amazon store. In fact, you should be able to Export your current listings from eBay / Amazon and upload them directly to BigCommerce or Shopify!  

BUT, before you start a free trial at BigCommerce or Shopify, check this out..

If you sign up for my all-time-fav cash back program, MrRebates.com, you will get 15% Cash Back IF you decide to stay with BigCommerce after the free trial has ended.  

Shopify currently does not have a Cash Back offer. We use BigCommerce but I have heard great things about Shopify too.

Next, Read The First 35 Steps to Start Your New eCommerce Website