Why Your Business Needs Its Own Website, Not Just Marketplaces
Marketplaces bring traffic, but the storefront is rented: rising fees, price wars, hidden buyer data. Why small businesses need a website of their own.
A batik seller I know in Bekasi spent three years building a steady income on a marketplace. Then one algorithm update buried her products in search results and revenue dropped by nearly half in two months. The products were the same. The prices were the same. The only thing that changed was the rules of a house she never owned.
This is not an argument against marketplaces. They bring enormous traffic, and people arrive already intending to buy. The problem is more specific: if your entire business stands on a storefront someone else owns, you are renting, not building.
On a marketplace you are a guest
Everything on a platform follows the platform’s rules. Commission rates keep climbing — in Indonesia they have gone from one or two percent a few years ago to eight percent or more in some categories, before free-shipping program fees. An account can be frozen over a competitor’s report, and the appeal process takes weeks while your sales sit at zero.
Remember October 2023, when TikTok Shop in Indonesia was shut down overnight by a regulation change? Millions of sellers lost their main sales channel in a day — not for anything they did wrong. The ones who stayed calm were those with channels of their own: a website, a customer database, WhatsApp numbers they could message again.
The part most sellers overlook: the buyer data is not yours. Phone numbers are masked, emails hidden, purchase history locked inside the platform’s dashboard. A customer who has bought from you three times cannot be greeted when your new collection drops. Yet repeat buyers are the cheapest sales you will ever make.
The marketplace shelf is a price war
Open any product page and scroll to “similar items”. That is your position: displayed next to dozens of near-identical listings, sorted by price and promo. The only lever left is cutting price, and margins get thinner every year.
On your own website, the comparison is not one click away. Visitors judge the whole picture — clean photos, the story behind the product, customer reviews, how quickly you answer questions. Price still matters, but it stops being the only thing that does.
Google sends free buyers, if there is somewhere to land
Every day someone searches for “custom birthday cake Makassar” or “leather shoes Bandung”. Without a website, those searches land on marketplace pages where your competitors wait with lower prices. With one, they can land directly on you — no middleman, no commission. The basics are less complicated than they sound; we covered them in our local SEO guide for small businesses.
Instagram is not a website either
“We already have IG” feels safe until you look closely. Organic reach keeps shrinking, a catalog stored in highlights is painful to browse, and the bio holds exactly one link. Checkout through DMs means your cashier is the admin’s thumb: quote the price, calculate shipping, send the bank account, check the transfer. One order can take fifteen messages. On a busy day, someone’s message slips through — and that is a sale quietly lost.
Starting does not have to be expensive
Your first website does not need to be fancy. A single page with a product catalog, a WhatsApp button, your address, opening hours, and a few customer reviews already beats having nothing. Modern site builders — including the one built into Tenavora — can produce that in an afternoon without touching code, with an order form that lands straight in your WhatsApp.
The decision worth more thought is the domain name, because that is a long-term identity you should not keep changing. We wrote a separate guide to choosing a business domain.
Not either-or — each channel has a job
The sensible play for most small businesses: use marketplaces to be discovered by new buyers, use your own website to build an asset. Slip a small card into every marketplace package — “Order directly at our website for a better price”. Simple, legal, and it slowly moves your best customers to the channel you fully control.
Do the math once: an 8 percent commission on 30 million rupiah of monthly sales is 2.4 million rupiah — nearly 29 million a year handed to the platform. A fraction of that covers a domain, hosting, and ads pointing at a store that is actually yours.
Let the marketplace be where people find you. Just make sure they come home to a house with your name on it.