Marketplace or your own store: the numbers to run first
- A marketplace sells your product. Your own site sells you — different jobs entirely.
- Commissions on Ukrainian platforms range roughly from 3% to 27% depending on the category.
- The sum is simple: what commission costs you a year, and what a store would cost once.
- For most sellers the healthy answer is not either/or — a platform for volume and a site for the brand.
The conversation almost always opens the same way: “We do fine on the marketplace, why would we need a site?” It is a fair question, and the answer is not always “you do”.
What you are really buying on a marketplace
Traffic and trust. Someone searches for a product, lands on a platform they already know, and buys — you never have to explain who you are.
You pay in two currencies. The first is commission. The second, less obvious, is the customer. They stay the platform’s customer: you do not have their email, you cannot tell them about a new range, and you never become a brand in their head.
| Marketplace | Your own store | |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic at launch | Immediate | Has to be built |
| Cost of entry | Low | From $2500 once |
| Cost per order | Commission on every one | Advertising only, if you use it |
| Customer list | Not yours | Yours |
| Pricing | Squeezed inside a shared listing | Yours |
| The rules | Set by the platform | Set by you |
That last line is not hypothetical. In July 2025 Prom introduced a per-order fee for orders coming through own-domain storefronts hosted on the platform. The point is not the amount but the mechanism: terms in someone else’s house change without your involvement.
The back-of-a-napkin sum
That is roughly a store with a proper catalogue, payments and stock integration. The figure is misleading, though: your own site will not take those 200 orders the day after launch. It takes them over six to twelve months, and only if someone keeps investing in it.
The worst decision is leaving the marketplace “because it is expensive” and ending up with no traffic at all. The right order is the reverse: launch the site alongside, grow it to a steady flow of orders, and only then decide what to do about the platform.
When you definitely need the site
- You have a brand or you manufacture. Inside a shared listing you are one line among ten.
- Repeat purchases. Cosmetics, pet food, consumables. Here the customer list is worth more than the commission.
- The product needs explaining. Made-to-order furniture, equipment, complex machinery.
- You have hit the ceiling of the category. Volume is there, but there is nowhere left to grow inside the platform.
- You want to sell abroad. Local platforms do not take you there.
When it can wait
If you have just started and are still testing whether the product moves. If you take 10–20 orders a month — the commission on those is less than hosting, support and ads. If you resell someone else’s goods with no brand premium — nobody is searching for you by name.
In those cases the marketplace is not a compromise, it is the correct tool. The site becomes necessary when something appears that does not fit inside someone else’s listing.
We will run the numbers with you: what commission costs a year, what a store would cost, and what the sensible first step is.