Do I need a website, or can I just sell on Etsy or Amazon?

If you're just starting out, marketplace-only is a reasonable place to begin — Etsy and Amazon bring built-in shoppers, and you skip the work of attracting your own traffic.

But there's a trade you're making, whether you think about it or not:

• They own the customer. You can't email your buyers, and the reviews attach to the platform, not to you.
• They take a cut of every sale — fees stack up on each order, forever.
• They make the rules. Fee changes, policy updates, even account suspension are all out of your hands.

Most sellers who last end up with both: a marketplace for discovery, and their own website for brand, repeat buyers, and margins. The sooner the second piece exists, the more of your business you actually own.

The pricing models point in opposite directions:

• Marketplaces charge per sale. Listing fees, referral fees, and payment processing stack up on every order — commonly a meaningful, double-digit percentage of each sale once everything adds up. The more you sell, the more you pay.
• Your own store charges by the month. Most hosted platforms run roughly $25–$40/month, plus standard card processing — and there's no platform fee on top of each sale.

At low volume, the marketplace's "pay only when you sell" is genuinely convenient. As volume grows, the flat monthly cost of your own store usually wins — sellers doing steady business often find marketplace fees exceed everything their own site costs combined.

The marketplace does. That's the part most sellers underestimate:

• No email list. Platforms restrict or prohibit contacting your own buyers for marketing — the customer relationship is theirs.
• No brand pull. A shopper searching Etsy sees your product next to ten identical ones; on your site, they see your shop, your story, your full catalog.
• No repeat-purchase engine. The cheapest sale you'll ever make is to someone who already bought from you. On a marketplace, you usually have to pay for that customer all over again.

On your own store, every buyer joins your list. For small stores, that list of past customers is often the single most valuable asset — it's how the next launch gets sales without paying a marketplace toll.

Yes — and it happens to sellers who did nothing wrong. Accounts get suspended over policy interpretations, buyer disputes, or plain automated enforcement mistakes. Appeals take time, and while you wait, your income from that channel sits at zero.

If 100% of your sales run through one marketplace, a suspension pauses the entire business overnight. If the marketplace is one channel next to your own site, the same event is an annoying Tuesday. That resilience — not the fees — is the strongest argument for owning your own store.

It's a legitimate strategy, not a failure state — in the right situation:

• Validating a product. Before you invest in a brand, marketplaces tell you fast whether anyone buys what you make.
• Very occasional sales. A few orders a month don't justify the overhead of running a store — and don't need to.
• Zero brand ambition. If you'll never want repeat buyers or direct relationships, the fees may be worth the simplicity.

The honest signal that you've outgrown marketplace-only: fees getting heavy, a wish for repeat customers, or people searching for your business by name and finding nothing. Any of those means it's time for your own site.

Both, in a deliberate order. Keep the marketplace for discovery and new-customer traffic — it's still where buyers shop. Build your own store as the place your brand lives: full margins, your email list, your repeat buyers. Each marketplace order can nudge buyers toward your site (packaging inserts, packing slips, brand packaging) so, over time, customers land somewhere you own.

The split shifts as you grow — more sales on your site, fewer toll payments — but you never have to choose one and abandon the other.

We set up and maintain stores on Shopify, WooCommerce, and Squarespace — product pages, payments, shipping settings, and the background care (daily backups, updates, security, speed) that keeps a store safe while you're busy making what you sell.

You email us the task, we handle it, and the store stays yours. No jargon, no surprises.