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When a SME decide to start selling products on the Internet, one of their greatest fears is the subject of costs, in order to implement a webpage. This makes that tis type of companies many times desist from entering to this great media, that brings opportunities to all type of companies regardless of their size.
However many years ago SMEs have different options if they want to sell their products on Internet and they don’t have a lot of resources in order to do it: marketplaces. These are spaces in which sellers can create an ecommerce with a certain grade of personalization ad sell their products through it. The buyer will see as any virtual store, but the backend is owned by the marketplace provider and not by the store.
What is the positive aspect of a store in a marketplace? In general terms, it has one benefit I already mentioned: the cost of it. The different marketplaces that exist today have different plans that adapt to different budgets, therefore the entrepreneur will not have to invest a huge quantity of money at the beginning of the project but a monthly payment, which makes it easier for them to start owning an ecommerce.
But what are the negative aspects of a Marketplace? The ones that exist today have basically two negative points, according to my take on this subject. The first is that many of them are only designed to sell physical products, and this may cause some difficulties to SMEs that want to sell digital products.
The other point that I consider worst than the one I just mentioned is that the provider only sells the platform but doesn’t have any other commitment than this. This point makes it difficult for companies to sell on their store, because thy don’t have the knowledge and experience to do it, and many of my colleagues may agree with me that the technological aspect is their least serious problem. What is really important and that generates value to entrepreneurs is knowing how to use their platform in a strategic way being able to refer traffic to it, that at the end buys on their store.
Therefore I think that companies that provide these marketplaces are missing the two aspects I mentioned before. I hope that in a given moment this two problems disappear with a company that is able to fill the void that is really important for companies today.
Image taken from Flickr.com
