When a marketplace beats your own shop

You put six mugs on a marketplace and three sold in a fortnight. You put the same six on your own link, posted about it twice, and sold one, to someone who already follows you.

That's not a fluke and it's not a failure of your page. It's the trade, working exactly as designed.

A marketplace brings its own buyers. Your own link brings none, ever, and no amount of tidying it changes that. In exchange, the marketplace takes a cut of every sale, sets the rules, and keeps the customer. So the answer to which one wins is not ideological. If you're selling a £28 mug to strangers who are searching for "handmade speckled mug", the marketplace probably wins right now. If you're selling to people who already follow you, paying commission on those orders is money you're giving away for a service you didn't use.

The one thing a marketplace does that you cannot

It has people on it, today, with their card details already saved, actively looking for something.

That's it. That's the entire product, and it's genuinely enormous. Everything else a marketplace offers, listings, photos, reviews, messaging, is table stakes. What you're actually buying is demand you did not have to create.

Consider what creating that demand costs you otherwise. To get 30 strangers to your own page you have to make something people want to watch, post it, get lucky with distribution, and hope a fraction of them tap through. That's a skill, it takes months to develop, and it works unevenly. A marketplace hands you those 30 people because somebody typed a search into a box.

For a new seller with no audience, this is not a close call. Your first hundred sales are much easier to get somewhere that already has traffic, and the commission on a hundred sales is a cheap education.

The one thing your own shop does that a marketplace cannot

You get to keep the customer.

On a marketplace, the buyer bought from the marketplace. They may not remember your shop name a week later. You usually can't message them outside the platform, you often can't put your own link in the parcel, and their next purchase of the same category goes to whoever ranks highest that day, which may not be you.

On your own link, the buyer is yours. You have their number or their email. You can message them in November about the thing they bought in June. Repeat customers cost nothing to acquire and they're the entire difference between a business and a hobby with good months.

The second thing you keep is the margin. No commission on the manual rails, and no ranking to buy your way into.

The third is that nobody can switch you off. A marketplace account suspension, right or wrong, is a business that stops on a Tuesday with no notice and an appeals process measured in weeks. Sellers who have been through it never fully go back to depending on one.

The arithmetic, done properly

Most comparisons of this stop at the commission percentage, which is the least interesting number in it.

Take a £28 mug. Materials and packaging £7, postage £4.20, so £16.80 left before any platform takes anything.

Where it sells	What comes off	You keep
Marketplace at an example 10% commission plus payment processing	£2.80 plus roughly £0.90	About £13.10
Marketplace at an example 20% all-in	£5.60	About £11.20
Own link, bank transfer	Nothing	£16.80
Own link, card	Card processing, plus 1–3% of goods to Sailo	About £16.00

Do not take those commission percentages as anyone's actual rate. Marketplace fees vary by category, by country, by whether you've opted into their ads, and they change. Open the marketplace's own fee page and work out your real number before you decide anything, because a guess here is worth several hundred pounds a year.

Now the number that actually decides it, and it isn't in the table.

What fraction of your marketplace orders would have happened anyway? A buyer who saw your reel on Instagram, searched your shop name on the marketplace because their card was already saved there, and bought, is an order you generated and then paid commission on. That's the expensive one. You did the work and rented the checkout.

If most of your marketplace sales come from marketplace search, you're getting what you pay for. If most of them come from people who found you on social first, you're paying a finder's fee for a customer you found yourself.

Demand you capture versus demand you create

This is the cleanest way to think about it, and it maps straight onto what you sell.

Captured demand is someone who already wants the category and is looking for it. "Personalised dog collar", "size 9 hiking boots", "wedding invitation template". They will type it into a search box. A marketplace is built for exactly this and you will never beat it at it, because the buyer starts on the marketplace, not on Instagram.

Created demand is someone who did not know they wanted it until they saw it. Your cake decorating video, your thrift haul, the candle that looks like a stack of books. Nobody searches for that. They see it and want it. A marketplace adds almost nothing here, because you brought the buyer through the door yourself.

Sort your own products into those two piles honestly. Most sellers have both, and the mistake is treating them the same. The searchable ones belong where people search. The ones that only sell when someone sees them belong on a page you control, linked from the post that made them want it. That page has to actually work, which is a separate discipline covered in what to put in your bio link.

Ellie in Bristol: both, deliberately

Ellie makes ceramics in Bristol. Mugs at £28, small bowls at £22, a big serving platter at £75. She has about 3,000 followers on Instagram, which is a real audience but not a large one, and she has been selling for two years.

She sells the mugs and bowls on a marketplace. They are searchable objects, people buy them as gifts, and a decent share of her orders there come from strangers who found her through the marketplace's own search. She's happy paying for that, because those are customers she could not have reached with a reel.

She sells the platters on her own link only. Nobody searches for a £75 hand-thrown platter. They buy it after watching her throw one, which happens on Instagram, and the commission on a £75 item was buying her nothing. On her own link she keeps the full margin, and she takes payment by bank transfer for most of them because her customers are British and perfectly comfortable with it.

The part that surprised her was Christmas. She messaged 140 past buyers from her own link in early November, offering the platters before she listed anything publicly. Forty-one of them bought. She could not have sent that message to any of her marketplace customers, because she doesn't have their contact details and isn't allowed to use them that way if she did.

Her split now runs roughly 60% of orders on the marketplace and about 65% of her profit on her own link. Both of those numbers are correct at the same time, and that's the whole argument.

What a marketplace charges you beyond the commission

The percentage is visible. These aren't, and they add up.

• Price compression. Your listing sits beside forty similar ones sorted partly by price. Over time that pushes what you can charge down, in a way that never happens on your own page where you're not next to anybody.
• Ads that become non-optional. Once enough sellers in your category are paying for placement, organic ranking is worth less, and the ad spend is a second commission you volunteered for.
• Their returns policy, not yours. You inherit rules written for a platform with millions of listings, and they're not written with your unit economics in mind.
• No customer relationship. Covered above, but it's the biggest cost and the one that doesn't appear on any statement.
• Platform risk. Ranking changes, category changes, policy changes, suspension. None of it is announced in advance and none of it is appealable quickly.

None of that makes marketplaces a bad deal. It makes them a deal, with terms, and the terms are worth reading.

When the marketplace clearly wins

Be honest with yourself about these. If two or more are true, list there and stop agonising.

• You have fewer than about 500 engaged followers, or none.
• What you sell is something people search for by name.
• You sell a product other people also sell, and your edge is craft or price rather than personality.
• You're selling internationally and the marketplace handles the customs paperwork and the currency.
• You want your first sales this month, not after six months of learning to post.
• Your product photographs well in a grid and doesn't need explaining.

When your own link clearly wins

• Your buyers already follow you, and you can name a few of them.
• What you sell is unusual enough that nobody knows the search term for it.
• Your margin is thin enough that a double-digit commission removes most of the profit.
• You want repeat orders and you're willing to message people.
• You sell custom or made-to-order work where the conversation is part of the product.
• You take payment on a rail the marketplace doesn't support anyway, like a local bank transfer or cash on delivery.

Running both without doing the work twice

Most sellers who last do both. Doing it without doubling your admin comes down to a few decisions made once.

Split by product, not by channel. Searchable items on the marketplace, personality items on your own link. Don't list the same thing in both places at the same price and then wonder why the marketplace wins; it wins because it has traffic and you just handed it a customer.

Keep your stock honest. If an item exists in both places and you have one of it, one of those two listings is a promise you can't keep. Either hold different stock for each, or only dual-list things you can make more of.

Put your own link in the parcel. Whatever the marketplace's rules say about marketing, a slip of paper with your shop name on it inside a box you shipped is how most sellers move a customer from rented to owned over time. Check the specific rules for the platform you're on before you print anything.

Send everything you post on social to your own link. Every single time. That is the one flow where you're paying nothing to nobody, and it's the flow most sellers accidentally route through a marketplace out of habit. The wider version of that argument is in selling on social media without a website, and the fee arithmetic on small orders specifically is in how payment fees eat a small order.

The limitation, stated plainly

Sailo is not a marketplace and it will never send you a customer. There is no search, no directory, no browse page, no recommendation engine. Every person who lands on sailo.store/yourname got there because you sent them. If you have no audience, a shop page on Sailo is a very tidy room with nobody in it, and a marketplace is the honest recommendation for you this year.

The costs, since this is a comparison and you should be able to check the arithmetic. The free plan is $0 for 10 products. On bank transfer, cash on delivery, and orders handed off to WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, email or phone, Sailo takes no commission at all, because Sailo never holds the money. Card payments need a Stripe account Stripe has cleared for charges, and Sailo takes 1–3% of the goods on each card order, after discounts and excluding delivery and tax. Charges land in your own Stripe account, not in Sailo's.

At three orders a month, that $49 is worse than any marketplace commission you'll find. At sixty orders a month of £28 mugs, it isn't close in the other direction. Work out where your own crossover sits rather than trusting either of us. The wider question of which payment rails are worth setting up at all is covered in how to take payment as a small seller.

Sort your products into two piles

Take your product list tonight and split it in two. Things a stranger would type into a search box. Things nobody knows to search for.

List the first pile where people search. Put the second pile on your own link, and send every post you make to it.

Then check in three months which pile made more profit per item, not per order. That number will tell you more than this article can, because it'll be about your products rather than about the general case.