1. Advantages and Disadvantages of Opening a Store on a Third-Party Platform
The advantages of opening a store on a third-party platform are:
(1) The third-party platform has a certain degree of recognition and brings its own traffic. Third-party platforms often have a large amount of ready-made traffic. Sellers can directly enjoy the traffic when they join the platform, and the traffic is very high in shopping intention, without having to introduce traffic on their own.
(2) The third-party platform has perfect services. In order to attract more sellers to join the platform, the platform will also provide more complete supporting services and will continuously adjust its services according to the needs of sellers.
(3) The third-party platform is well managed. Selling products on a third-party platform requires compliance with the rules set by the platform. The platform will also close and clean up some sellers who do not abide by the rules to create a good competitive environment.
The disadvantages of opening a store on a third-party platform are:
(1) The store opening review procedures are complicated. For example, the information required to open a store on Amazon is quite cumbersome.
(2) If you are not careful, your account may be easily blocked. There are many rules, and sellers who are not clear about the operating rules are likely to touch the “high-voltage line” and have their accounts blocked.
(3) A certain service fee is required. Platform services are not free, but require fees, such as commissions, advertising and promotion fees. If you use the platform’s warehousing and logistics, you also need to pay a certain fee.
(4) It is impossible to clearly know the specific information of the buyer, which is not convenient for secondary sales. All buyers enter through the platform, and sellers cannot export data, which is not conducive to saving buyer information for secondary sales.
2. Advantages and disadvantages of independent station operation The advantages of independent station operation are mainly:
(1) Free control. An independent station is a website established independently by the seller. The seller has absolute control, which can reduce dependence on the store opening platform, does not need to be constrained by the platform, and has free control of the sales rights.
(2) It can enjoy exclusive customer sources, avoid malicious low-price competition from the platform, and improve customer stickiness and loyalty. The seller can earn all the profits from the products sold, and does not need to pay commissions, promotion fees, etc. to the platform, achieving 100% profit.
(3) It is more convenient to collect and maintain buyer information. Buyer information can be directly collected by sellers for subsequent continuous re-marketing and cross-selling. For product development companies, they can also communicate with users to continuously obtain direct feedback on products, continuously optimize products, and improve buyer user experience more conveniently in the future.
(4) It can be bound to an independent domain name, which makes it easier to do search engine promotion and there are more ways to promote. Independent sites help build private brands, easily promote corporate brand information, highlight brand personality, and facilitate brand promotion.
(5) It is easier to enhance corporate image, flexibly display corporate information, and fully demonstrate corporate strength.
(6) It has more powerful functions and better scalability. It can set its own rules, which can give customers a better purchasing experience, enable business inspiration and creativity to be implemented faster, and bring greater business opportunities.
The main disadvantages of independent site operation are:
(1) It requires support from a good technical team and operation team. Although with the popularity of third-party SaaS website building tools such as Shopify, creating your own independent website does not require technical front-end and back-end development as before, the basic website user experience, shopping process settings, website product details pages, etc. still require the establishment of a professional technical team to build and maintain, and the cost and subsequent expenses are relatively high.
(2) There is no free natural traffic. Traffic acquisition is a bottleneck for independent websites. Independent websites need to maximize the retention, conversion and value mining of users attracted in the early stage through user operations, and overseas promotion is more difficult.
(3) High capital investment. The funds required to build a website are much higher than the funds required to enter the platform, and more effort is required. It also takes a relatively long period of time to build the trust of new customers.
(4) There are fewer payment methods than third-party platforms.