Every product business hits the same fork in the road: keep selling through Etsy or Amazon, where the customers already are, or build a website of your own, where the profit stays. Neither answer is wrong, but most small business owners pick one without ever comparing the real numbers. This guide sets out what a marketplace listing actually gives you, what it quietly costs, what an e-commerce website costs to build in the UK in 2026, and which one fits your business at the stage it is at right now.
What a marketplace gets you
Etsy and Amazon exist because they solve a genuinely hard problem: getting strangers to find your product. You are placed in front of millions of people who are already searching to buy, with trust, payment handling and even returns already built for you. For a brand-new product business with no audience and no marketing budget, that is worth a great deal. There is no design work, no hosting to manage, and you can have a listing live within a day.
The trade-off is that you are a tenant, not an owner. The platform sets the rules, takes a cut of every sale, and can change its algorithm, fees or policies without asking you. Your shop can be suspended, your listing can be buried below a competitor who pays for ads, and you rarely get the customer's email address, which means every repeat sale has to be won again from scratch.
What it actually costs
The headline "it is free to start" hides a fee structure that adds up fast. Etsy charges a listing fee per item, a transaction fee of around 6.5 percent on the sale price, and a payment processing fee on top, before you have paid anything towards actually marketing the item. Amazon's individual seller plan takes a per-item fee, while the professional plan runs around £25 a month plus a referral fee that is typically 8 to 15 percent depending on category. Sell £3,000 a month through a marketplace and it is common to hand over £400 to £600 of that in combined fees, on top of whatever you already pay for stock, packaging and postage.
A website you own has none of those per-sale fees. At Migap, a full e-commerce store with product management, secure payments and shipping typically costs between £2,000 and £8,000 to build, depending on catalogue size and integrations, a range we break down properly in our Manchester website cost guide. After that, ongoing costs are usually just hosting, a payment processor's standard card fee (around 1.5 to 2.9 percent, far below marketplace rates), and any maintenance you ask for. The break-even point depends on volume, but for a product doing steady monthly sales, an owned website frequently pays for itself within a year purely on fees saved.
The bit marketplaces never give you back
Fees are the visible cost. The invisible one is ownership of the relationship. On your own site you can capture an email address at checkout, send a discount code to someone who abandoned their basket, and build a mailing list that is worth more every month it grows. On a marketplace, that customer belongs to Etsy or Amazon, not to you, and they will happily show that same customer your competitor's product on the very next page.
Brand also compounds differently. A well-designed site lets you tell your story, control your photography, and price based on your own margins rather than being pushed into a race to the bottom against ten near-identical listings. Nielsen Norman Group's research on e-commerce product page usability is a useful reminder that a well-structured product page, clear photos, honest descriptions, visible reviews, converts noticeably better than a cluttered one, and on your own site you control every part of that.
The hybrid approach most product businesses end up using
In practice the smartest product businesses do not pick one and abandon the other. They use the marketplace for what it is good at, discovery, and their own site for what it is good at, margin and repeat business.
- List bestsellers on Etsy or Amazon to catch people already searching, while running your full catalogue on your own site
- Add a small "shop direct and save" line on marketplace listings once you have built enough reviews there to justify it
- Use your own site's email list, built at checkout, to bring marketplace customers back for their second and third order without paying a platform fee again
- Add an AI product advisor to your own site to answer sizing, stock and compatibility questions instantly, something we build for clients from £650, which marketplace listings simply cannot offer
So which one is right for you?
If you are testing a brand-new product with no track record, start on a marketplace. It is the cheapest, fastest way to find out if people will actually buy it, and the fees are a fair price for that validation. Once you have proof that people want what you sell, usually somewhere around your first hundred orders, the maths shifts firmly towards owning a site: lower fees per sale, an email list that keeps paying you back, and a brand that is yours rather than rented. If you are already established with a loyal following on Instagram or word of mouth, skip the marketplace stage entirely and go straight to your own store, because you already have the one thing a marketplace was going to sell you: an audience that knows your name.
Selling online also comes with real legal obligations regardless of which route you choose, distance selling rules, clear returns policies and accurate pricing, and GOV.UK's guidance on online and distance selling for businesses is worth reading before your first sale, not after a complaint.
Getting started
We have built e-commerce stores, product advisor bots and full web platforms for UK product businesses; have a look through our portfolio for examples of what a finished build actually looks like. If you already sell on a marketplace and are wondering whether the numbers now favour a site of your own, send us your current monthly sales and fees and we will tell you honestly where the break-even point sits for your business. Full pricing for every package is on our services page.