Selling on an online marketplace: the sale is yours, the customer isn't
Amazon, eBay, Etsy, TikTok Shop: somebody else's shop window, full of shoppers. You get the order. The marketplace keeps the customer, and charges a fee for the introduction.
- 080Marketplace
- An online platform where multiple third-party sellers can sell their products or services to consumers, such as Amazon or eBay.
- Examples
- Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Not On The High Street, TikTok Shop
- You get
- The order, a delivery address and a payout after fees
- You don't get
- The right to market to the buyer, often not even their email
- Best used for
- Reach and discovery, with your own site keeping the relationship
What a marketplace gives you, and what it keeps back
Look, marketplaces are good at what they do. They've got the shoppers, the trust and a checkout people already use, and some will store and ship your stock too. A product nobody's heard of can sell on day one. Your own website can't promise that.
What they keep is the relationship. The buyer is the marketplace's customer, its rules decide what you can say to them, and next time they want something like yours it's free to show them a rival first. You paid a fee for one order, not for a customer.
Why a marketplace order doesn't put anyone on your list
On your own Shopify checkout, the email address arrives with the order and lands in Klaviyo. On a marketplace you get what fulfilment needs: a name, an address, the items. Amazon and TikTok Shop don't hand you an address to market to, and their seller rules limit how you can contact buyers at all.
Unless you give them another, the buyer who loved your product has one route back to you: searching for your name. Make sure that route works, with your own site where they land and a reason to sign up waiting.
Getting marketplace buyers onto your own list
Every marketplace writes its own rules on inserts, messages and links away from the platform, and enforces them. Read them before anything goes to print. Inside those rules, the product and its packaging are the touchpoints you still control.
- One clear reason to visit your site: a guide, a warranty registration, a refill only you sell
- A short web address or QR code landing on a page built for people who own the product
- A short flow written for an owner, not your standard welcome series
- A tag on the profile, so you can count the buyers you've moved across
We've written up getting customer emails from Amazon buyers in more detail, and the TikTok Shop version runs on the same idea.
When the marketplace price undercuts your website
Pricing is where marketplaces and email trip over each other. If your product is cheaper on Amazon than on your own site, your emails become adverts for Amazon. People click, check the price, buy it there, and the next order lands somewhere you can't email them.
Keep the price level wherever you can, and give your own site the reasons to buy direct: bundles, subscriptions, exclusives, early access. The marketplace gets the shopper who's never heard of you. Your site gets everyone who has.
Related terms
FAQs
Should a DTC brand sell on Amazon as well as its own site?
Often, yes, if your product is something people search for on Amazon. That's reach you'd struggle to buy anywhere else. Go in knowing it's a sales channel, not a relationship: price it consistently, protect your own site's reasons to buy direct, and build a route from the parcel back to your list.
Which marketplace buyers are worth moving to my own site?
The ones who'd buy again. A buyer of something consumable, or of the first piece in a range, is worth an insert and a flow. A one-off gift buyer probably isn't. Start with your products that repeat, count how many buyers you capture, and widen it once the numbers say it's working.
Do marketplace fees make my own website the cheaper channel?
Not automatically. A marketplace takes a fee on every order, but it also brings the shopper. Your own site skips the fee and pays for the visit instead, through ads, search or social. Email is the cheap part: once somebody's on your list, asking for the next order costs you next to nothing.
Rather we explained it on your own account?
Bring your Klaviyo account to a growth consultation. We'll walk through what this means for your numbers, in plain English, and what we'd fix first.
Half an hour with Theo, our founder.
We're all about relationships built on trust, mutual respect and a shared vision for success. If that sounds like your vibe, let's make some waves together 🌊
