Choosing the Right Online Sales Channels for Your Products

Start With Your Margins, Not the Hype

Before you open a single seller account, do the maths on one typical order. Take a £40 product. If it costs you £14 to make or buy, and £4 to post, your gross margin is £22. Now subtract the costs of the channel you are considering.

A marketplace might take a referral fee of 10–15%, plus a monthly subscription, plus payment processing. Suddenly £5 or £6 has gone. Add a return at your own expense and the order can wipe out its own profit. On your own website, you will typically pay around 1.5–2.5% plus a small fixed fee to your payment provider, but you carry the cost of driving the traffic yourself.

Neither is better in the abstract. What matters is whether the channel's fees leave you enough to cover marketing, packaging, VAT if you are registered, and the occasional refund. If a channel only works when nothing goes wrong, it does not work.

Your Own Website: Control, Data and Long-Term Value

A website is the only channel you genuinely own. You set the prices, the bundle offers, the photography and the tone of voice. You keep the customer email address, so you can invite people back at Christmas or when you launch a new line. You are not competing with a dozen near-identical listings on the same search results page.

The trade-off is that nobody arrives by accident. You have to earn every visit through search, email, paid ads or word of mouth, and that takes either money or patience, usually both. A realistic first-year budget for a small independent might be £300–£600 a month on ads, plus the cost of an e-commerce platform, a domain and a decent email tool.

Treat your site as the hub. Everything else should feed it where possible.

• Best for: distinctive products, repeat purchases, building a brand people remember.
• Watch out for: abandoned baskets, card chargebacks, the temptation to redesign the site instead of promoting it.

Marketplaces: Borrowed Audiences, Borrowed Rules

Marketplaces put your products in front of people who are already shopping with intent. That is a genuine advantage when you are unknown and have no email list. For many independents, the first ten sales come from a marketplace, and there is nothing wrong with that.

The catch is that you are a guest. Fees rise, categories get restructured, and your listing sits beside competitors who may undercut you on price or beat you on delivery speed. You rarely get customer contact details, so you cannot build a relationship. Reviews are powerful but they belong to the platform, not to you.

Read the fee schedule properly before you commit. Look for referral percentages, closing fees, storage or listing charges, and how returns and disputes are handled. Then ask yourself a simple question: if the fees doubled tomorrow, would this channel still be worth my time?

Social Platforms: Discovery First, Checkout Second

Social selling works best for products that photograph well, demonstrate easily, or sit inside a passionate community — handmade goods, niche hobbies, beauty, homeware, anything with a story. Selling fees are often modest, in the region of 5% plus payment processing, which looks attractive next to a marketplace.

What the fee does not tell you is the hidden cost: content. You need a steady stream of short videos and images, and consistency matters more than polish. A shop that posts twice a month will not build an audience. Choose social only if you can honestly commit a few hours each week to filming, editing and replying to comments.

• Best for: visual products with a clear audience and a founder willing to be on camera.
• Watch out for: turning your best ideas into unpaid content for a platform that may change its rules next quarter.

Matching Channels to How People Actually Buy

Think about the buying moment, not the technology. Some purchases are searched for by name; some are discovered while scrolling; some need three visits before anyone commits.

If customers search for a specific item, marketplaces and search-friendly product pages matter most. If they stumble across you and buy on impulse, social works harder. If they buy the same thing every eight weeks, your website plus email is the strongest combination you have, because it costs almost nothing to remind them.

Ask your existing customers where they found you and, more usefully, where they nearly bought instead. Ten honest conversations will teach you more than any comparison table.

Rolling Out Without Spreading Yourself Thin

Pick two channels, not five. A sensible pattern for most small independents is a simple website plus one marketplace or social shop, run properly for six months before adding anything else.

Set a review date in your diary. At that point, look at the numbers that actually matter: profit per order, not revenue; repeat purchase rate; time spent per sale. If a channel takes fifteen hours a month and returns £80, it is a hobby, not a business.

Keep your product data tidy — titles, dimensions, materials, care instructions — so you can list anywhere without rewriting everything. Keep your packaging consistent, so a marketplace customer who later finds your site recognises you. And keep talking to buyers. Channels change constantly; the people who love your products tend to stay put, and they are the ones worth building around.