Your Own Store vs Marketplaces (Amazon, Etsy): Where Should You Sell?

The "own store versus marketplace" debate is usually fought as ideology. Purists say selling on Amazon means building your house on someone else's land. Pragmatists answer that without traffic there are no sales to argue about. Both are right — at different stages of the same business.

This guide takes no side. It puts numbers on the decision: what each platform actually charges, the full math on a €30 product, and the concrete signals that it is time to open your own store.

What marketplaces really charge

Fee schedules change often — always check the current tables before committing. But the patterns have been stable for years:

• Amazon (Portuguese sellers typically go through amazon.es): a referral fee of 8–15% depending on category — 15% for most — plus €39/month for the professional plan (or €0.99 per item on the individual plan). FBA fulfilment, if you use it, is billed on top.
• Etsy: roughly $0.20 per listing, a 6.5% transaction fee on the price including postage, and payment processing around 4% + €0.30. Then the famous surprise: an extra 12–15% whenever a sale arrives through Etsy's Offsite Ads — a programme you cannot opt out of once you pass about $10,000 in annual sales.
• Dott (the Portuguese generalist marketplace): commission by category, typically in the 10–20% range. Nothing like the giants' reach, but a fully domestic audience and far less competition.
• Your own store: zero commission. You pay payment processing (roughly 1.4–2.5% plus a few cents per transaction, depending on card, MB Way or Multibanco reference) and the cost of the site itself.

The math on a €30 product

Say you sell a product at €30, postage included. Materials cost €9. Real shipping costs €4. You make 30 sales a month.

Channel	Fees per sale	Left over (after fees, shipping, materials)
Amazon (professional plan)	€4.50 referral + €1.30 of the monthly fee spread out = €5.80 (~19%)	€11.20
Etsy (organic sale)	€1.95 + €1.50 + €0.19 = €3.64 (~12%)	€13.36
Etsy (sale via Offsite Ads)	€3.64 + €3.60 = €7.24 (~24%)	€9.76
Your own store	~€0.67 processing (~2%)	€16.33

The honest reading: between Amazon and your own store sits about €5 per order. At 30 orders a month, that is €150/month. But your own store brings no traffic on its own — that €150 is, in practice, your marketing budget. The right question is not "what does the marketplace charge?" but "can I generate the same traffic for less than €150 a month?". In year one, almost nobody can. By year three, with a brand and repeat customers, almost everybody can.

What they give — and what they take

What marketplaces give is real:

• Traffic from day one. Millions of searches with purchase intent, without you spending a euro on ads.
• Borrowed trust. The buyer already has an account, already trusts the checkout, already knows the returns policy.
• Logistics, solved (with Amazon's FBA): storage, shipping and returns handled by someone else.
• Effortless export. On Etsy, a maker in Braga sells to Germany and the US without building anything.

What they take — beyond the commission:

• The customer relationship. The email address, the history, the contact all belong to the platform. To the buyer, you are a near-anonymous supplier inside someone else's shop.
• Price and shelf control. Parity rules, Buy Box battles, platform-wide promotions that squeeze your margin without asking.
• Your account, occasionally. Algorithmic suspensions — an IP complaint, a run of bad reviews — land without warning, and appeals take days or weeks. With zero sales in the meantime.
• Your sales data. The platform sees exactly what works. That is not paranoia; it is the business model.

The three dependency tiers

The risk is not using marketplaces — it is how much of your revenue depends on them:

Share of revenue	Diagnosis	What to do
Under 30%	An acquisition channel. Healthy.	Carry on, tracking true cost per sale
30–70%	Dependency. A fee change genuinely hurts.	Start building your own channel now
Over 70%	You are renting your business.	Treat diversification as urgent, not a someday project

A business that is 100% marketplace does not have a marketing problem. It has a landlord — one who can rewrite the lease by email on a Friday afternoon.

The full comparison table

	Own store	Amazon	Etsy	Dott
Cost per sale	~2%	~15–19%	~12–24%	~10–20%
Do you own the customer?	Yes — email, history, remarketing	No	Partly (in-platform messages)	No
Price and brand control	Full	Low	Medium	Medium
Logistics	Yours (CTT, couriers)	FBA available	Yours	Yours
Traffic	You must earn it (SEO, ads, time)	Huge, generalist	Niche — handmade and vintage, very international	Domestic, modest
Main risk	Being invisible	Suspension; the platform competing with you	Fee hikes and algorithm shifts	Limited reach
Right when	You have a brand and repeat buyers	Standard product, real volume	Handmade product with international appeal	You want to test the Portuguese market

The hybrid path — what most makers should do

For most small producers, the answer is not either/or. It is a sequence.

1. Marketplace for discovery. In year one, let the platform do what it does best: put your product in front of strangers. Measure two things from the start — true cost per sale, and the percentage of customers who come back.
2. Your own store for repeat business. When the triggers below fire, build your store — payments, legal obligations and all (the full setup guide is here) — and move your regulars to it.
3. An email list as the bridge. Mind the rules: Amazon forbids diverting customers off-platform, and Etsy has similar limits. What no marketplace can forbid is a brand that sticks — your name on the product, packaging people remember, and a genuine reason on your site to leave an email address, like early access to new pieces. From there, the newsletter does the work no commission ever will.

The migration triggers

If any of these is true, the numbers have already decided for you:

• 20% of your customers repeat. Paying a discovery commission on the same customer's third purchase means paying for traffic you already owned. It is the worst deal in this article.
• Annual commissions exceed the cost of a store. €400/month in fees is €4,800 a year — more than a well-built small store costs to create and run.
• People search for your brand by name. If the marketplace's own stats show searches for your name, direct demand exists and has nowhere of yours to land.
• One marketplace is more than half your revenue. It has stopped being a growth engine and become your biggest single risk.

And some sellers should stay marketplace-only

Let's be clear: if you sell 10–15 pieces a month and each customer buys once and never returns, Etsy is probably the right home — and your own store would be a fixed cost in search of a payoff. There is no shame in that. Bookmark this article and redo the math when volume or repeat rates change.

If, instead, the triggers above sounded familiar and you want to know what your store would cost — with Portuguese payment methods and an email list growing from day one — describe what you sell in two minutes and you will get a concrete range, no meeting required.