Selling online without building an e-commerce site: what it really takes and what it costs

A distributor considering online sales usually weighs two routes: building their own e-commerce site or joining a marketplace. The comparison is normally made on initial cost, which is the least relevant part.

A proprietary site has a visible development cost and a running cost discovered afterwards. Hosting, certificates, updates, payment integration, regulatory adjustments, maintenance.

To these is added the item that weighs most and that almost nobody budgets for: traffic. A new site has no visitors, and acquiring them requires continuous investment in ranking and advertising.

The realistic calculation is not what the site costs but what the first customer arriving on it costs. For a B2B supplier in a specialist sector, that figure is high and does not fall quickly.

The marketplace inverts the cost structure. There is no initial investment in technology, and the cost is tied to sales: you pay in proportion to what you take in.

On Oralzon the structure is an annual fee of 199 euros and a 7% commission on sales. There are no listing fees, no catalogue fees, and no charges tied to the number of products uploaded.

This means a catalogue of thirty items and one of three hundred cost the same in terms of access, and that a month without sales costs only the proportional share of the subscription.

The difference from a proprietary site is not ideological but one of risk. The marketplace shifts risk from the supplier to the platform: if you do not sell, the platform does not earn.

What should not be underestimated is time. Opening a working e-commerce site takes months between development, populating the catalogue, testing payments and meeting compliance.

Opening a shop on a marketplace requires registering the company, verifying tax details, configuring payments and uploading the catalogue.

The two routes are not mutually exclusive. Many distributors use the marketplace to reach markets where they have no network, and their own site for customers already acquired. They are channels with different functions.

The useful question is not which is better in the abstract, but where the customers who do not yet know you are. For an Italian supplier, a dentist in Belgium or Portugal will never reach the company website: they have no reason to look for it.

In summary: the cost of an e-commerce site is not development but traffic acquisition, the marketplace ties cost to sales rather than to investment, launch times differ by orders of magnitude, and the two channels serve different customers.