On the Internet, you can find a huge number of articles on how to effectively sell through online sites and their advantages over individually designed websites. In this article, we will not argue, because many traders really successfully sell their goods on trading platforms. We will try to find out at what stage of the development entrepreneur’s business requires his own website.
About the trading platforms in a nutshell
The marketplace is a kind of aggregator of goods. Basically, they work on the principle of registration, uploading goods through their private office and… waiting for the first visitors (usually in the personal office you can see the statistics of visits to your goods). Trading platforms are investing quite a lot of money in SEO-promotion, so you can expect that even on the high-frequency request, the first page of the search engine will be linked to goods from the sites.
Advantages of issuance
Portal Prom.ua even offers users to create sites on own domain. A constructor of such site is so simple that it can be created by any user who can hold a mouse in his hands. For an additional fee, you can order an individual design for your template. Also for trading platforms users are held training and everybody has his own manager. It would seem, what else is needed? We decided to check whether everything is as easy as it seems.
High issuance is not yet a guarantee of a sale
We write a high-frequency query “to buy women’s jeans” in the search line. Immediately under advertisements is a link to the popular trading platform. Follow the link – a lot of jeans, sorted by popularity, no signs for indication of store name or the name of the seller. And there are such 209 pages. Show more? A rare user will go further than the 2nd-3rd page, which means that you need to work on your account – buy premium packages from the trading platform, order promotion already inside of it.
To keep your positions on the first pages you need to pay regularly
To get an online store with the necessary functionality, you have to pay an amount that is quite comparable to the individual development of the website.
The difference is that the web studio you pay for the development once and the site will be yours, and on the trading platforms – this is a monthly fee. Do not pay – the site will be disconnected, all your investments will be wasted.
Investing in someone’s business
An online store that does not belong to you will only work until you pay a subscription fee. Thus, you invest money not in your business, but in the business of the trading platform owners. At your expense, it develops its functionality, makes improvements and connects the SEO modules. Stop paying the subscription fee, and your site will be lost, and the platform will continue its development.
How to win permanent customers?
Of course, the marketplace, if used correctly, can be a good place for selling. However, if you want to get regular customers who will recommend you to others – you need to provide a place where your customers will come back again and again, without distracting on your competitors, not looking for your product in hundreds of other people’s offers. You can’t do without your own website. And if you want to attract additional traffic to the site – no problem, we can install a special parser that displays your products on popular trading platforms. When clicking on such product, the user redirects to your site.
The online store will work for you
WEB-SYSTEMS SOLUTIONS has been developing online stores for almost 10 years. During this time, we have developed a system of standards for the development, design, content filling. When ordering an individual website development you get not just a working solution, but an online store created with regard to usability adapted for mobile devices, already prepared for further SEO optimization.
Invest in your business
To attract customers to the website, you can also use contextual advertising, if you notice that it is higher in search results than trading platforms, and is shown specifically for your target audience. By attracting traffic to your site you increase its position. Many of our customers asked us to create an online catalog, and they all returned with time to expand the site into an online store. This is perhaps the best evidence that individual development pays off, brings respect and income to the owner of the website.
