E-commerce: selling online in 2019

E-commerce is big and it is growing. It is not a secret that traditional brick and mortar stores are having difficult times competing with online stores. Even goods that were considered impossible or too difficult for online sales are doing well, such as used cars. The paradigms are constantly challenged. So if you have a business and you are not selling online you are missing out. 

Setting up a store using an existing marketplace, like Amazon is quite simple, but is that really a good idea? 

Amazon is facing major troubles for investigations in its treatment of merchants that sell goods on its platform. Whether Amazon is using nonpublic data from independent merchants to compete unfairly against them or not, it is clear that Amazon picks a seller as the default option for a given product when the user clicks the buy button.

The truth is that any marketplace has restrictions, terms or service, and access to private information from the merchants. 

Setting up your own online store provides control and security, as well as savings for not having to pay the use of third party platforms. Using a third party marketplace  is a risk, the store could be vanish by changes in the term of services at any given time.

Owning your online store requires an initial investment, but the savings in each transaction will pay for the site.