Website vs marketplace (Amazon/Etsy): which should you build?

Sell somewhere long enough and the same question comes up: should you build your own online shop, or list on a marketplace like Amazon or Etsy? Both put products in front of buyers and take payment, but they pull your business in opposite directions — one trades control for reach, the other trades reach for margin and ownership. Here is how to think about the choice, with real fee numbers, and why most sellers eventually run both.

The core trade-off: reach versus ownership

A marketplace hands you a ready-made audience. Millions of people already search Amazon and Etsy with their card out, so you skip the hardest part of ecommerce — getting strangers to find and trust you. In return, you rent that audience. The platform sets the rules, owns the customer relationship, controls how you appear in search, and can change fees or suspend your account without much warning.

Your own website is the opposite. Nobody arrives by accident, so you have to earn traffic through search, ads, social and word of mouth. But everything you build is yours: the brand, the customer list, the checkout experience, the data. You keep far more of each sale, and no algorithm decides overnight whether people can still see you.

Neither is "better". They solve different problems, and the right starting point depends on your product, your margins and how much you value owning the relationship.

What marketplaces actually cost

The fees are the clearest part of the decision, so start there.

Amazon (Europe). A Professional selling plan costs €39 per month excluding VAT, flat, however much you sell. On top of that you pay a referral fee on each sale — a commission that varies by category, with most falling between 8% and 15% of the total price, and some reduced categories now as low as 5%. If you use Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) for storage and shipping, that is billed separately again. So a typical seller loses the monthly subscription plus roughly a tenth to a seventh of every order before shipping and product cost. [Source: Amazon Europe pricing]

Etsy. Etsy charges a $0.20 listing fee per item (renewed every four months or when the item sells), a 6.5% transaction fee on the order total including shipping, and a payment processing fee that varies by country — broadly in the region of 3–4% plus a small fixed amount per order. Stacked together, sellers commonly hand over close to 10% plus fixed fees per sale, before any optional advertising. Etsy also makes Offsite Ads mandatory once you pass a certain annual turnover, adding a further 12–15% on sales that come through those ads. [Sources: Etsy fee schedule, Etsy Help]

The pattern is consistent: marketplaces convert your margin into their marketing. That can be a fair deal when the traffic they send would cost you more to buy yourself — but it is a permanent tax on every unit, not a one-off.

What your own website costs

A website flips the maths. There is an upfront build and an ongoing platform or hosting cost, but the per-sale fee drops to just payment processing — typically around 1.5–3% plus a small fixed fee through a provider like Stripe, depending on card type and country. There is no referral fee and no marketplace subscription skimming every order.

The catch is traffic. That marketplace commission was really paying for discoverability, and on your own site you cover that yourself through SEO, content, email and paid ads. For a sense of what the build itself runs to, our guide on how much a website costs in 2026 breaks the numbers down by scope.

Whether the swap pays off comes down to volume and margin. Low-price, low-margin items struggle to absorb both marketplace fees and paid traffic, so the platform's free reach is genuinely valuable. Higher-margin or repeat-purchase products — where a customer is worth far more than a single order — reward owning the relationship, because you can sell to that person again for free.

Beyond fees: control, data and brand

Money is only half the story. Three things matter as much over the long run.

• Customer data. On a marketplace, the buyer is largely the platform's customer, not yours. You often cannot email them, retarget them or bring them back except by paying the platform again. On your own site, every buyer becomes a contact you can nurture — the difference between renting attention and owning it.
• Brand and experience. Marketplace listings look like everyone else's. Your product sits next to competitors, price is the loudest signal, and there is little room to tell a story. Your own shop lets you control design, packaging, upsells and the whole feel of buying from you.
• Risk. A single policy change, fee rise or account suspension can wipe out a marketplace-only business overnight. A website you own is a durable asset that does not depend on one company's goodwill.

This is the same ownership argument that applies to renting reach on social platforms — we cover it in website vs social media. The principle carries across: borrowed audiences are fast to start and dangerous to depend on.

Why most sellers end up doing both

In practice the question is rarely either/or. A common and sensible pattern:

1. Start where the buyers already are. If you are validating a product, a marketplace gets you sales quickly without building traffic from scratch. You learn what sells, at what price, with real customers.
2. Build your own store in parallel. Once you know a product works, stand up a website so you have somewhere the margins are yours and the customer list is yours.
3. Shift your best products and repeat buyers to your own site. Use the marketplace for discovery and your website for loyalty, higher margins and everything you cannot do on a platform.

The marketplace becomes a customer-acquisition channel; the website becomes the profit centre and the asset you actually own.

How to decide where to start

Run the numbers before you commit. Take one product and work out what you actually keep after fees, shipping and cost of goods on each channel. If a marketplace's commission leaves you a workable margin and you have no easy way to drive your own traffic yet, start there. If your margins are thin, or your product is high-value or repeat-purchase, the case for your own store from day one is strong.

Do this concretely with our ecommerce margin calculator — plug in your price, cost and each platform's fees and see what lands in your pocket per order on each route. That single comparison usually settles the debate faster than any rule of thumb.

Where to go from here

For most European sellers the honest answer is: use marketplaces to find customers, and own a website to keep them. The sooner you have a store that is genuinely yours, the sooner your margins and your customer list stop belonging to someone else.

If you want a shop built to convert and to grow beyond the marketplaces, see web development — or book a free consultation and we will map the right channel mix for your product and margins.

Sources: Amazon Europe seller pricing, Amazon 2026 European fee update, Etsy Help — payment processing fees.