Marketplace or your own website: how D2C brands should split sales

Fibvo editorial · 4 March 2026 · 5 min read

Orders on Amazon and Flipkart grow every month, yet the bank balance does not. Someone suggests launching your own store to escape the fees. Someone else points out that nobody visits a new brand's website. Both are partly right. The useful question is not which channel wins, but what job each one does for the business and what it really costs to fulfil an order through it.

Work out contribution margin per order, per channel

Headline commission rates make marketplaces look expensive and your own site look free. Neither impression holds up. Build a simple sheet that follows one typical order from selling price to what is left. For a marketplace, subtract:

• GST, product cost and packaging.
• Referral or commission fees, fixed or closing fees, and the platform's shipping or weight-handling fees.
• Fulfilment and storage fees if the marketplace holds your stock.
• Sponsored listing spend divided by the orders it produced, since organic visibility for a new brand is limited.
• The cost of customer returns and return-to-origin shipments, including units that come back unsellable.
• The cost of waiting for settlements, especially if you borrow to fund stock.

For your own website, subtract GST, product cost and packaging as before, then:

• Payment gateway charges and cash-on-delivery handling fees.
• Shipping through your courier or aggregator, plus the cost of cash-on-delivery orders refused at the door.
• Platform subscription, apps and theme costs, spread across monthly orders.
• The advertising cost to win the order, usually on Meta and Google. This is the line most brands underestimate.

A website order often earns less on the first purchase once acquisition cost is counted, and more on every repeat order that needs no ad spend. That is the trade to understand before you move budget.

Who owns the customer

On a marketplace, the buyer is the marketplace's customer who happens to buy your product. You receive what you need to ship the order, contact details are usually masked, and seller policies generally forbid using order data for your own marketing or steering buyers off the platform. On most major marketplaces that includes package inserts promoting your website or offering discounts elsewhere. Read your seller agreement before printing anything for the box.

Brand programmes on the larger platforms offer aggregated search and purchase insights, and some let you send updates to people who follow your brand store. That is useful, but the relationship still runs through the platform and on its terms.

A marketplace lends you its customers one order at a time.

On your own website, you hold the email address, phone number and order history. That makes replenishment reminders, subscriptions and early access to launches possible. It also makes you responsible for the data. Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, you must tell customers what their data will be used for, obtain consent for uses such as marketing, and make withdrawing consent as easy as giving it.

Give each channel a job

Running both works best when each channel has a clear role instead of competing for the same order.

• Marketplaces for discovery: people searching category terms who have never heard of you and who trust the platform's delivery and returns.
• Marketplaces for lower-priced, fast-moving items where buyers compare mainly on price and delivery speed.
• Your website for repeat buyers, bundles, the full range, larger packs, gifting and subscriptions.
• Your website for bulk, corporate and overseas enquiries that marketplace listings do not handle well.
• Your website as the reference point for anyone who finds you on a marketplace or in a shop and searches your brand name to check you are genuine.

The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) offers another route to buyers through participating apps. Treat it as a separate channel with its own fees and logistics, and test it with a limited range before committing stock.

Run both without undercutting yourself

• Keep prices broadly consistent. Marketplaces monitor prices across the web and may reduce the visibility of your offer if the same product is noticeably cheaper elsewhere, including on your own site.
• Differentiate with what the marketplace listing does not carry: bundles, exclusive pack sizes or variants, gift wrapping, subscription pricing or a loyalty scheme. Give bundles their own SKUs.
• Use one source of truth for inventory, with a buffer held back for each channel. Cancellations caused by overselling damage marketplace seller metrics quickly.
• Keep product names, images and key specifications consistent, so a buyer moving between channels recognises the product, and write fuller content on your own site.
• Align returns and warranty terms, or explain any differences plainly. A customer with a faulty product does not care which channel it came from.
• Report both channels in the same monthly review, using contribution margin rather than revenue.

A sensible order of moves

• Start where demand already exists. If buyers search for your category on marketplaces, sell there first and learn which products and price points work.
• Open your own store once you have a product people buy more than once, enough range to fill a basket, and a budget to acquire customers and keep in touch with them.
• Judge the website on repeat purchases over several months, not on first-order profit.
• Avoid shifting all effort to one channel after one good month. Marketplace fees, policies and ranking changes are outside your control, and so is the price of advertising.

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Written by Fibvo — Bengaluru and Erode, India — working with clients in other time zones. Questions, or think we have it wrong? Tell us.