The nine things you no longer have to do yourself when you sell on a marketplace

Anyone weighing up an online store thinks first about the cost of the site. It is the most visible part and almost never the most expensive.

The real cost is everything around it, which has to be built and then maintained for years.

Taking payment, to begin with. Accepting cards means integrating a provider and handling declines, refunds and disputes. On a marketplace the payment arrives already collected and paid directly to you.

Cross-border VAT. Every sale into another European country requires establishing the correct treatment and verifying the customer's VAT number in the VIES register. The platform does this on every order.

Languages. A catalogue that must exist in eight languages means eight translations per listing, and eight updates at every change. Here you upload in one language only.

The accounting documents issued to you, generated and archived without having to ask for them.

Then the things you notice only when they are missing: internal search that has to work in eight languages, pages that have to be readable by search engines, listings that have to be fast on a phone, order notifications, returns handling, an order archive the customer can consult.

None of these is impossible to build. Together they are a software project of months, plus maintenance, plus updates whenever a tax rule or a medical device regulation changes.

And this is the part that gets underestimated: not the cost of starting, but that of staying current for years on matters that have nothing to do with your trade.

It is worth saying what remains entirely yours, because no platform does it for you.

The catalogue, meaning what to sell and at what price. The quality of the listings, which decides whether the people who arrive buy. Preparing and shipping orders. And accurate availability, which is the simplest thing and the most neglected: one order cancelled because the product was not there does more damage than ten orders that went well.

The split is clean: the platform handles the infrastructure, you handle the product and the service. Whoever expects it to bring customers too without doing their part ends up disappointed; whoever does their part finds there is far less to look after than they thought.

In summary: the cost of an online channel is not the site but everything around it, payment cross-border VAT translations and documents are already handled, what gets underestimated is staying current for years on matters outside your trade, catalogue listing quality and shipping stay yours, and accurate availability is the simplest thing and the most neglected.