The question arrives at every distributor eventually, usually framed as a choice: do we list on a marketplace, or do we build our own store?
It is framed as a choice because both options require money and attention and it feels like you have to pick. But the framing hides the actual decision, which is not about channels at all. It is about whether you are buying demand or building an asset — and those are different purchases with different payback periods, and the right answer for most small distributors involves doing both, in a specific order, for specific parts of the range.
This article works through the real economics of each, the questions that determine which fits your business, and the sequence that tends to work when the budget will not stretch to doing everything at once.
The Marketplace Trade — What You Are Actually Buying
You are renting demand. That is the whole product.
A marketplace has buyers on it already. That is the only thing it sells you, and it is a genuinely valuable thing — customer acquisition is the hardest and most expensive part of building a distribution business, and a marketplace hands you a queue of people already looking.
The price is not just the commission. The full cost:
- Commission, typically somewhere between 5% and 20% of order value depending on the platform and category
- Price transparency, meaning your price sits next to three competitors on one screen and the buyer sorts by it
- The customer relationship, which in most cases is not yours — you may not get the email address, you may not be permitted to contact them off-platform, and the repeat order goes back through the platform and pays commission again
- Rules you do not control, which change, and which change in the platform’s favour over time because that is what platforms do
- Your own data, which the platform now has, including exactly which of your products sell and at what price
When the marketplace maths works:
- Your gross margin can absorb the commission and still leave a real contribution. At 12% commission on a product carrying 18% gross margin, you have 6% left before you have paid for a single warehouse hour. That is not a business.
- The buyers are genuinely new — people who would never have found you otherwise
- The product is comparable enough that being on a list is not a disadvantage
- You are not simultaneously training your existing customers to buy from you via a channel that takes 12%
That last point is the one that catches people. A meaningful chunk of marketplace volume for established distributors is existing customers who found the marketplace more convenient. You have not gained a customer. You have started paying commission on one you already had. Measure this explicitly — match marketplace buyers against your existing account list in month one. If more than a quarter overlap, the channel is cannibalising, not acquiring.
The Own-Store Trade — What You Are Actually Building
You are building an asset with no demand attached.
Your own store has zero visitors on the day it launches. The technology is not the hard part and has not been for years — the hard part is that a B2B store with no traffic is a very expensive PDF catalogue.
What you get in exchange for solving the traffic problem yourself:
- No commission. Every euro of margin stays.
- The customer relationship, entirely. Email address, order history, the ability to contact them, the ability to build a reorder automation.
- Your own pricing logic. Customer-specific pricing, contract pricing, volume breaks — the things B2B actually runs on and that most marketplaces handle badly or not at all.
- The data, including what people searched for and did not find, which is the most useful range-planning input you will ever get.
- An asset that compounds. Traffic you earn this year still arrives next year. Commission you paid this year is gone.
The costs people underestimate:
- Product data. This, not the platform, is the real work. Every SKU needs a description, specifications, images, and correct categorisation. For a distributor with 3,000 SKUs and a supplier feed that is a spreadsheet of part numbers, this is months of effort. It is also the single most common reason B2B store projects stall at 70% complete and never launch.
- Traffic. Content, SEO, and possibly ads. Slow, and the payback starts in month six at the earliest. The SEO groundwork for B2B is the realistic version of this timeline.
- Ongoing maintenance. Prices change, stock changes, products get discontinued. A store with wrong prices is worse than no store.
The B2B-specific requirements a consumer platform will not give you cheaply: login-gated pricing, per-customer price lists, minimum order quantities, quote requests on non-stocked lines, credit terms at checkout, VAT handling for cross-border EU sales, and reorder-from-history. If a platform cannot do customer-specific pricing, it is not a B2B platform regardless of what the marketing says.
The Comparison That Actually Decides It
Run the numbers per SKU category, not for the business as a whole.
The decision is almost never uniform across your range. Work it through like this:
For the marketplace, per category:
- Gross margin percentage
- Minus commission percentage
- Minus incremental fulfilment cost (marketplaces often demand faster shipping than your standard)
- Minus the price erosion you will accept to be competitive on a sorted list — be honest, this is usually 3–8%
- Equals contribution per euro of revenue
For the store, per category:
- Gross margin percentage
- Minus payment processing, roughly 1–2%
- Minus allocated cost of acquiring the traffic
That last line is where people give up, because it feels unknowable. It is not. Take your total annual spend on content, SEO, and ads; divide by the number of orders those channels produce. That is your acquisition cost per order. Divide by average order value and you have a percentage directly comparable to commission.
The result is usually clarifying. For most small distributors, a mature own-channel produces an effective acquisition cost somewhere between 3% and 8% of revenue, against marketplace commission of 10–20%. The store wins on unit economics — and loses badly on time-to-first-order and on cash, because the acquisition spend comes first and the orders come later.
The number that settles it is repeat rate. A marketplace customer who orders once and pays 15% commission is roughly break-even against a store customer costing 15% to acquire. A customer who orders twelve times a year is entirely different: on the marketplace you pay 15% twelve times, on your store you paid once. If your business has genuine repeat purchase — and distribution almost always does — the store is the better asset by a wide margin, provided you survive long enough to get there. Our piece on recurring revenue and loyalty for distributors covers the mechanics of making that repeat rate real.
The Sequence That Works
Do not treat this as either/or. Treat it as a sequence with a specific purpose at each stage.
Stage 1 — Marketplace, narrow, for acquisition. List a deliberately limited range: products with margin thick enough to absorb commission, ideally ones that lead to a relationship rather than a one-off. The purpose is not marketplace revenue. It is finding out who buys, what they search for, and what price the market actually clears at. That is market research you are being paid to conduct rather than paying for.
Stage 2 — Build the store while the marketplace runs. The store is being built with real data now: you know the categories that move, the questions buyers ask, the price points. Start with the product data, because it is the long pole and it is the thing you can do before you have chosen a platform. Launch with 200 SKUs done properly, not 3,000 done badly. The platform choice for B2B ecommerce matters less than most people think at this stage.
Stage 3 — Migrate the repeat business, deliberately. Existing customers and marketplace customers who ordered more than once get a reason to buy direct: better pricing, faster reorder, account terms, order history. Not a plea — a genuinely better experience. This is where the commission line starts falling.
Stage 4 — Keep the marketplace for what it is good at. New customer acquisition and long-tail discovery. Do not close it out of principle. It becomes a paid acquisition channel with a commission-based fee structure, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to have, and one you can compare on equal terms against ads.
Where the sequence breaks: violating the platform’s terms by trying to pull customers off it. Inserting a flyer in a marketplace order saying “order direct next time and save 10%” gets accounts suspended, and platforms are good at detecting it. The legitimate route is to be findable — a customer who knows your brand name and searches for it has made their own decision, and no platform term prevents you from being worth searching for.
The Questions That Change the Answer
A few situations invert the standard advice:
- Your margins are under 15%. The marketplace maths probably never works. Go direct or do not go at all.
- You sell one product category to a defined set of buyers who all know each other. You do not need discovery. You need a phone and a store. Marketplace adds nothing.
- You are entering a new geography. Marketplace first, almost always. It solves trust, language, and local payment in one step, and it tells you whether the demand exists before you invest in the market.
- Your product needs specification, configuration, or advice to buy. Marketplaces are bad at this. The order that requires a conversation is not an order a marketplace will send you well.
- You have no ability to produce product data. Then you cannot have a store yet, and the honest answer is to fix that first, because the same data problem will limit everything else you try, including any attempt to automate the catalogue later.
The trap in this decision is treating it as a technology choice, because technology choices have vendors, and vendors will happily tell you which platform to buy. It is not a technology choice. It is a choice about whether you would rather pay for demand now or build it slowly, and the honest answer for a small distributor with limited cash is that you need some of both — marketplace revenue to fund the present, own-channel investment to own the future.
What you must not do is drift. The distributor who ends up in trouble is the one who listed on a marketplace three years ago, never built the alternative, and now discovers that 60% of revenue flows through a channel that just raised its commission and does not have to negotiate. The marketplace is a fine place to start. It is a dangerous place to still be standing when someone else changes the rules.
Sources: European Commission — Platform-to-business trading practices · European Commission — Internal Market and Industry