Jump to
Oct 08, 2026
Marketplace vs standalone webshop: where the maths actually flips
The marketplace vs standalone webshop question is usually asked too early, by people who already have a gut answer, and the honest reply is that a marketplace is the cheaper place to start for most sellers until the commission you pay each month is larger than what it would cost you to find those buyers yourself. that point is measurable. most sellers never measure it, so they either leave too soon or stay far too long.
Studio Ubique is a web design and SEO agency from Zwolle, active since 2012, building custom websites, webshops and applications for Dutch SMEs and international clients. That means this article is written by people who earn money building webshops, so keep an eye on us when we say you need one.
A marketplace sells you customers by the order, a webshop sells you the chance to keep them, and most sellers pay for the wrong one first.
What you actually rent on a marketplace
On a marketplace such as Amazon or bol.com, you rent three things: traffic, trust and a checkout. You do not rent the customer. The buyer remembers they bought it on Amazon, the email address stays with Amazon, and the next purchase starts with a search on Amazon where your competitor sits one row below you.
A marketplace is a platform where many sellers list products under one shop front and pay a cut of every sale. That cut is the referral fee, a percentage of the sale price, often with a fixed fee per item on top. For a new product with no brand recognition, that rent is a bargain. You get thousands of daily visitors on day one without paying for a single ad.
The trouble is that the rent never stops. On your thousandth order to a repeat customer, you still pay the same percentage as on the first. That is the part nobody budgets for.
Studio Ubique works from Zwolle since 2012.
Most of the shop owners who end up asking about a standalone store have the same story: sales grew nicely on the marketplace, margins did not, and somewhere around year two they noticed they had built a business they did not own.
Where the marketplace vs standalone webshop maths flips
The maths flips when your monthly marketplace fees exceed your likely customer acquisition cost on your own shop, and enough buyers come back to make that cost a one-off. In practice that tends to happen somewhere between 8,000 and 15,000 euro in monthly marketplace revenue, with a repeat purchase rate above roughly 25 percent.
Customer acquisition cost is what you spend in ads, SEO and discounts to win one paying customer. Repeat purchase rate is the share of buyers who order again within a year. Those two numbers decide this whole question, and almost nobody has them written down.
Run it like this. Take 10,000 euro of monthly marketplace revenue. With referral fees between 8 and 15 percent for most categories according to Amazon’s own fee schedule (2024), plus fulfilment and per item fees, you are easily handing over 1,500 euro a month. Now ask what it would cost to win those buyers yourself. If you sell consumables people reorder every six weeks, paying 25 euro once to acquire a customer who then orders eight times a year directly is a very good deal. If you sell a one-time purchase like a garden bench, it is not. Every order is a new acquisition, and the marketplace does that job better than your ad budget will.
Studio Ubique rates are 60 to 65 euro per hour.
That rate matters here because the cost of a standalone shop is not just the build, it is the hours after it. A seller doing 3,000 euro a month on bol.com who spends 12,000 euro on a custom shop has bought roughly four years of commission in advance, for a channel with no traffic yet.
Decision box
- Best if: you sell reorderable products, already pass about 8,000 euro a month on a marketplace, and want the customer data.
- Not ideal if: your products are one-time purchases where every sale needs a fresh buyer anyway.
- Likely overkill when: you are still testing whether people want the product at all.
What breaks when a marketplace is your only shop
When a marketplace is your only shop, one decision made by someone you have never met can stop your revenue overnight. It rarely starts that dramatically. It usually starts with a small change to fees or ranking, then a slide in visibility, and only later the moment you realise there is no second door.
The order tends to go like this. First, the platform adjusts its fees or its search ranking, and margin drops a few percent. You absorb it. Then a competitor undercuts you and wins the buy box, the default “add to cart” spot that takes most sales on a shared product page. Your sales drop by half within a week and you lower your price to win it back. Margin drops again.
Then comes the bad one. A listing gets flagged, a review dispute escalates, or an automated check suspends the account while it is “under review”. Revenue goes to zero. Support replies in templates. You have no customer email list, no domain with traffic, nothing to send a newsletter to. Starting an own webshop at that point means building and marketing it at the same time, with no income, which is the most expensive way to do it.
Studio Ubique projects target Lighthouse 90+ on mobile.
That speed matters more than people think in this exact rescue scenario, because the first traffic to a new shop is usually paid traffic, and slow pages burn ad money. The cost of the panic build is not the build. It is the six months of zero.
What a standalone webshop costs before it earns anything
A standalone webshop costs money before the first sale and keeps costing money after it, mostly in time. Expect a build cost, a monthly running cost, and a long stretch where you pay to bring visitors in because nobody knows the address yet. The build is the part people quote. It is the smallest part.
The costs that tend to surprise people:
- Traffic: a new domain ranks for almost nothing for months, so the first buyers come through paid ads.
- Payments and fees: payment providers take a cut too, usually 1.5 to 3 percent, so you never reach zero commission.
- Customer service: returns, questions and complaints the marketplace used to handle now land in your inbox.
- Upkeep: plugin updates, hosting, security patches and product feeds that break when a supplier changes a column.
Studio Ubique builds custom websites in WordPress, Vue.js, Node.js, Next.js, NestJS and Laravel.
For most webshops though, a custom stack is overkill. Shopify or WooCommerce covers the vast majority of shops below a few hundred orders a day, and if you are deciding between those two, the page on Webshop laten maken walks through what a build involves. A realistic first version of a decent standalone webshop sits somewhere between 6,000 and 20,000 euro, depending on how much the product catalogue, filters and integrations demand.
Here is the uncomfortable bit for an agency that builds these. If you are below about 5,000 euro a month in total sales, the honest advice is usually a basic Shopify theme or no own shop at all. Paying an agency for a custom build at that stage is buying a shop window for a street with no foot traffic.
Why running both from day one usually goes wrong
Starting on a marketplace and your own webshop at the same time sounds like spreading risk. Usually it just halves your attention.
This is the opinion some readers will not like: for a small team, the “be everywhere” advice is worse than picking one channel and doing it properly. Two channels means two sets of prices to keep in line, two stock levels to sync, two places where customer service questions arrive and two sets of product content. A three-person business running both tends to do both badly. Marketplace listings go stale while everyone fiddles with the webshop banner, and the webshop gets no traffic because the ad budget went to marketplace promotions.
Pick the one that pays now. Add the other when the first one runs smoothly without daily attention.
One mid-sized seller we worked with launched their own shop alongside their marketplace store and priced it identically, assuming loyal buyers would come over. Almost none did. Why would they? Same price, slower delivery, unknown checkout. We should have pushed for a reason to switch before launch rather than after three quiet months.
Moving buyers from the marketplace to your own shop
You move buyers by giving them a reason the marketplace cannot match: a refill subscription, bundles, a loyalty discount on the second order, or products that only exist on your shop. Begging people to switch does nothing. Most marketplaces also restrict direct marketing to their buyers, so the reason has to sit in the product and the packaging, within the rules.
The cleanest version is an exclusive range. Keep your entry products on the marketplace where discovery is cheap, and put the larger sizes, the bundles and the refills on your own shop. The marketplace becomes the free sample. Your shop becomes the relationship. Read the platform terms on package inserts before you print anything, because the rules differ between Amazon and bol.com and change more often than anyone would like.
Once direct orders start coming in, the job shifts from launching to watching. Small leaks add up fast.
What to monitor monthly
- Total marketplace fees as a percentage of marketplace revenue, including fulfilment and advertising.
- Customer acquisition cost on your own shop, split by ads, SEO and discounts.
- Repeat purchase rate on your own shop compared with the month before.
- Share of total revenue coming from your own shop, so you see dependency shrinking or not.
- Checkout drop-off on your own shop, because paid traffic into a leaky checkout is money on fire.
Choosing a marketplace vs standalone webshop is a margin question, not a status question. Amazon charges referral fees of 8 to 15 percent for most categories (Amazon Seller Central, 2024), on every order, including repeat ones. According to Studio Ubique, an own webshop usually starts to pay once marketplace revenue passes roughly 8,000 euro a month and more than a quarter of buyers reorder within a year.
FAQs
Is a marketplace or a standalone webshop better for a new brand?
For a new brand, a marketplace is usually better at the start, because you get traffic and trust without paying for ads, and you learn quickly whether the product sells before spending thousands on your own shop.
How much revenue do i need before an own webshop makes sense?
A rough threshold is 8,000 to 15,000 euro a month in marketplace revenue, combined with a repeat purchase rate above about 25 percent, because only then do the saved fees cover acquisition costs and upkeep.
Can i contact marketplace customers to move them to my webshop?
Mostly no, because Amazon and bol.com restrict direct marketing to their buyers, so the usual route is exclusive products, bundles or refills on your own shop that give buyers a reason to look you up.
Does an own webshop remove all commission costs?
No, payment providers still take around 1.5 to 3 percent per transaction, and you add hosting, maintenance and advertising, so the saving is real but smaller than the marketplace fee alone suggests.
Should i use Shopify or a custom build for my first standalone webshop?
Shopify or WooCommerce fits most first webshops, while a custom build only pays off when your catalogue, pricing logic or integrations are complex enough that standard platforms force constant workarounds.
Every order pays rent
Each month you stay fully on a marketplace past the threshold, you pay commission on customers you could have owned, and that money does not come back.
